Spendra Personal Finance App Now Live on Google Play Store

In 2025, Google Play blocked 1.75 million apps from being published. Banned 80,000 developer accounts. Stopped 255,000 apps from getting excessive data access. Most non-tech founders don't see it coming. And it's not just bad actors getting cut. Legitimate apps are quietly disappearing too. They stopped getting updates, and Google delisted them for it. Here's what most founders miss. To ship an update, your app must target Android's latest API. Google raises that bar once or twice a year. Every raise breaks backward compatibility. Translation: a few engineering days every year just to stay listed. Not for new features. Just to not disappear. Skip those updates. Google hides your app from new users. Then removes it entirely. This is where most founders get caught. You shipped an MVP with a contractor. The contractor moved on. You have no in-house engineering. The app works, numbers look fine, nobody's panicking. If your firm shipped that MVP and never came back to it, you're already on the runway for the next purge. A mobile app lives on rented space. Google owns the platform. The rent is paid in engineering work, every year. Stop paying. You get evicted, without notice. When did your app last ship a release?

New age assurance legislation is pushing regulatory requirements down to operating systems and app stores, posing potential challenges for open source developers and infrastructure providers globally.

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐀𝐩𝐩’𝐬 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐥 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐠𝐥𝐞 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐲 𝐏𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐲 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐟𝐭 Google Play policy update shouldn't be a "fire drill." It’s a strategic checkpoint to ensure your app remains compliant, discoverable, and user-friendly. On April 15, Google introduced new standards for how apps handle sensitive data. If your product relies on Contacts or Location, here is the high-level summary of what your technical team needs to address: 𝟏. 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐜𝐲-𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐠𝐥𝐞 is moving away from broad READ CONTACTS access. To maintain a seamless user experience, apps are now encouraged to use the Android Contact Picker. It’s a cleaner, more secure way for your users to invite friends or share content. 𝟐. 𝐒𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬. For one-time precise location, the new Location Button is becoming the standard. This reduces the "permission fatigue" that often leads to users denying access or uninstalling apps during onboarding. 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬: Google has set a compliance window through October 2026. Taking action now ensures: - 𝐙𝐞𝐫𝐨 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Avoid rejected updates or sudden drops in visibility during critical growth phases. - 𝐔𝐬𝐞𝐫 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭: Implementing the latest privacy UI (like the Contact Picker) signals to your users that you take their data security seriously. - 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐯 𝐂𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐬: Proactive updates are always more cost-effective than emergency patches and rushed code-rewrites. 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬. It’s about building an architecture that adapts to platform changes without slowing down your roadmap. If you aren't sure how your current app handles these permissions, now is the time for a quick audit. 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐚𝐩𝐩 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬? I’m helping a few founders review their compliance roadmap this week. Send me a message or comment "Audit" below, and I’ll send over a checklist you can pass to your dev team. #AppFounders #TechStrategy #GooglePlay #MobileGrowth #StartupFounders #AppCompliance

https://lnkd.in/edpwNh5b Open letter opposing Google's plans to require all developers of Android apps to register with Google, thus ending the open nature of the Android platform.

Got a minute? Use that minute to find out why waste exists in your apps (maybe a lot more than you're aware of!) and what you can do about it 👉 https://hubs.la/Q04hKjf30 @AWS_Partners #amazoneks #k8s #finops #costoptimization #resourceoptimization

If web-versus-native were the deciding axis of the platform war, the entire Electron desktop category should have failed, but then it keeps dominating.. Slack. VS Code. Postman. Bruno. Spotify desktop. Every one of them a web-shell desktop app, every one of them shipping on the maintainer's cadence, and reaches to their users as soon as it's available. That fact has been sitting in plain sight for a decade and most platform-war retrospectives walk around it. Mobile did not beat the web on capability. Location, offline, push, camera, background sync. Every one of those is table-stakes a competent web app handles in 2026. The native-only residue (UPI in India, frame-budget games, sustained background GPS, RAW camera) is honest and small. Mobile beat the web on distribution. The store owned discovery, the install button, payment rails, push registration. The deciding axis the whole time was update friction. The Electron roster proves it from one side. PWAs prove it from the other. While sitting on top of same framework, and mostly using same primitives under the hood.. Web push on iOS landed in March 2023 with iOS 16.4. Chrome on Android had equivalent support a decade earlier. Service worker on iOS stayed partial and quietly broken for years. 'Add to Home Screen' was buried in the share sheet. The App Store review actively rejected PWA wrappers. A gatekeeper contesting channel control beat a technical advantage. When the channel is suppressed, even the maintainer's update advantage does not save you. I shipped Android apps for roughly a decade and left for backend in 2021. And now, it's obvious why I am not going back there ever. Full essay (the Cambridge Analytica hardening cycle and the death of the Android hobbyist economy are in there too): https://lnkd.in/dn8C4wwH BTW Where is your iteration loop bottlenecking right now, the code or the channel? #PlatformEngineering #MobileDevelopment #SoftwareDistribution #Electron #PWA

Repeating since apparently it is hard to understand: if your thing (company, app, ...) is down because one AZ in one AWS region is down, this is not Amazon's fault, this is how your "engineers" put it together. Get different ones.

STOP DOING manual in-app purchase implementations. You're setting yourself up for a world of maintenance pain. Picture this: It's late on a Friday night, and I'm elbows deep in code, trying to untangle a mess of in-app purchase logic. We were using an old system, and every OS update felt like it broke everything. Then, I stumbled upon StoreKit 2 and Google Billing Library 7. It was a game changer. The challenge was clear. Transitioning decades of spaghetti code into these new structured frameworks without disrupting the user experience. It was like replacing the engine of a plane mid-flight. But with a mix of grit and some 'vibe coding' sessions, we started to see light. StoreKit 2 offered seamless transactions with significantly fewer edge cases, while Google Billing 7 streamlined handling purchase states. These tools didn’t just simplify the process—they reinvented it. I remember the first time we executed a test transaction using StoreKit 2. Clean, smooth, and reliable. Our QA team breathed a sigh of relief, and our users? They barely noticed a thing—which meant we did it right. One key lesson learned? Don’t just code for today. Plan for tomorrow. These frameworks future-proofed our app, allowing us to focus on innovation, not firefighting updates. Have any of you made the switch? What has your experience been with these new libraries? #MobileDev #AppDevelopment #iOS #Android

Respects the user's intelligence Dark patterns — misleading subscription flows, hidden cancellation processes, notifications designed to manipulate rather than inform, artificial urgency — are increasingly common in mobile applications. They may produce short-term metrics but they destroy long-term trust. Users who feel manipulated do not stay. They leave and they tell others. Applications that treat users as intelligent adults — with clear pricing, honest descriptions, respectful notifications, and transparent policies — build the kind of relationship that results in long-term retention, genuine reviews, and word-of-mouth growth. This is not idealism. It is simply the correct long-term strategy for building software that people choose to keep. #GooglePlay #AndroidDevelopment #AndroidDev #Pakistan #KotlinDeveloper #ExtroidTechnology https://lnkd.in/dh4eXWW5

Frustrated by finance apps that demand your data and require cloud sign-ups? Insightly Spend was created to address two significant issues: the lack of privacy in budgeting apps and the complexity of simple expense tracking. The Solution: - Zero Cloud, Total Privacy: Your transactions and receipts remain on your phone’s Room database, not on a server. - No Barriers: Begin managing your money immediately with no sign-up required. - On-Device Intelligence: Receive forecasts and spending trends without your data ever leaving your device. - Full Localization: Optimized for both English and Arabic speakers. Download it now on the Play Store: https://lnkd.in/dun64Anc #Privacy #AndroidDev #FinTech #CleanArchitecture #IndieDev #DataSovereignty #Arabic