I burned several days over the last few months jumping through Apple and Google's App store hoops - DUNS numbers, identity verification, encryption documentation, half a dozen wizards about content in the app, privacy, and of course then the days long review process itself.

I've never published anything to https://zapstore.dev before and I just did it in 20 minutes. That includes me reading through the documentation and futzing with my Android keystore for several minutes which I had previously misconfigured. Absolutely delightful experience.

I'm hopeful that Google's blocking of third party apps and app stores is going to cause a flourishing of third party stores like Zapstore (and de-googled Android). The old systems are broken. I have to assume the deluge of vibe-coded apps is why my Apple review took 18 days. I want an app store where I pay security auditors to compile the apps themselves and go over the code with a fine-toothed comb. F-droid already has some custom repositories that more or less work this way. Zapstore has better infrastructure for this with the Vertex web-of-trust and app catalogs.