Seen above: one of our Android apps in the German version of Amazon Android app store
Dear readers and customers,
yesterday we received an Email that by 20th of August 2025 Amazon app store will close it’s doors on all Android devices.
In the meantime several online media outlets reported about the same sad news, for example Ars Technica, TechCrunch, and many others. In the official FAQ the US retail company mentions no why, unfortunately. Official numbers speak of 70,000 affected apps at the moment.
We are directly affected by this.
The Amazon Android app store was the last one which held all of our Android apps officially and conveniently for users to download. After the closing of Opera app store and our own retreat last year from Google Play Store due to technical issues, there will be no app store method anymore to get our Android apps, unfortunately.
We are sorry about this but can’t do anything.
In the first place the Amazon Android app store was meant to be the number 1 distribution platform for Amazon‘s own devices like the Fire TV and Fire Tablet, which were Android powered. One current rumour in the IT world is these devices don’t sell very well, a platform like this for apps is not needed anymore in general. And secondly, there was just no competition possible against the official app store from Google. Nobody knows for sure because as stated above, there’s no official Amazon reason.
As a sidenote the app store suited very well as an alternative on Android devices with Custom ROMs. Together with F-Droid, the Amazon Android app store could be seen as one of three big distribution platforms for any Android device out there. As of August this year, this will not be an option anymore.
Thanks Amazon for this possibility to be in the app store here. And although it’s always said IT is way too fast for anything, we checked our app submissions and found out that we were part of it for nine long years. We will never forget that and thanks for all who downloaded our apps! You are awesome!
Only the best,
the aethyx staff
Dear readers and customers,
bit by bit, our Android apps vanish from the official Google Play store.
It all started September 2023 when our only Android videogame, Zombie Resistor: Apocalypse, was found “not compliant with Google Play Policies” and thus removed. Google mentioned we missed a “Data safety form” – to be honest we had no f***ing clue what the problem really was here.
As our Android web browser, YAABy, was removed in March for the same reason, and Gizmeo Gadget News was forced to leave beginning of April 2024 too, we started digging. And fell into a rabbit hole we think was layed out entirely by the mega-corp Google itself.
We started a test, created an additional a “Google Play store privacy” document from scratch and updated the Gizmeo app first – and were rejected again. Furthermore, we are not allowed to use the “News” section for our app (but Gizmeo does exactly that: it’s weblog about electronic gadgets!) – a section we used since 2014(!) and never had to change. Double rejection – f*** yeah! We then contacted Google Play Store support, explained to them that this is nonsense and didn’t get a reply we could use for good (we can share the documents publicly in case some entity is interested). As our test for one app was not successful, we refused updating the other apps and currently think about releasing all of our Android apps with source codes on our GitLab.
You can vote for this action via our company LinkedIn page currently: https://linkedin.com/company/aethyx.
This is it! That’s summed up how Google Play died for us for distribution.
We had one helluva ride the last ten years. Thanks for all your support and your downloads! We hope you liked it!
Let’s see it from the bright side: the same thing must have happened to the Opera app store. In the later case, we didn’t even receive one Email, we just coincidentally some day couldn’t reach the app page anymore. Sh*t happens!
Yeah, being indie is in fact hard. For the moment, only Amazon is an app store where you can still download our Android apps if you like: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=mobile-apps&rh=p_4%3AAETHYX+MEDIAE+%28Sascha+Schroeder%29&ref=mas_dl. To this day, we don’t understand why on Amazon things work whereas with Google they don’t. We got the problem: we missed a form. But we created one, where rejected and then rejected again for another reason. This is bullshit, sorry folks.
Think twice where you release your apps,
stay positive out there,
the aethyx staff
Dear readers,
when we started creating web projects around 1999/2000 there weren’t much tools to track and analyse visitors on websites like today with Google Analytics or Piwik/Matomo. One the of the most nicest and configurable we found quite early in the OpenSource tool chcounter aka expcounter.
It was coded by Christoph Bachner as chcounter, let got and developed further by Volker S. Latainski and the community as expcounter, and development finally stalled years ago, unfortunately.
The usual start dashboard looked like this:
One “killer feature”, for example, was to show a real time, fully configurable counter as seen via the “Wayback Machine” on our video game weblog project zockerseele.com.
We tried hard, over a period of several weeks, to port expcounter from PHP 5.x to PHP 7.x but failed in the end. For every bug we fixed, two to three (or more) new PHP bugs appeared.
According to several forums entries porting seems quite hard, as it requires changes on myriads of files and also several rewrites of code; which we hereby confirm.
It even is mentioned a complete rewrite of the tool which we just couldn’t do in the end and had to let go of the tool. At least, we tried.
What we would like to do with this post is thank Christoph Bachner & Bert Körn firstly for developing this tool which we in the end used for lots, lots of years on several weblogs. We would further like to thank the community of coders which helped Volker S. Latainski make expcounter to what it was: an OpenSource tool how it should be done.
We think there should be no time wasted anymore to port or rewrite this tool and we call the project dead. R.I.P. chcounter/expcounter! Thank you, little counter friend!
Thanks for reading,
the aethyx staff