Conversations Messaging App Exits Google Play After 12 Years

Daniel Gultsch, the developer of the Android messaging app Conversations, pulled it from the Google Play Store on Sept. 24, 2026, ending a run that began when the app first shipped on March 24, 2014.

Gultsch announced the move in a post on his own blog titled "Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free," saying grant funding now covers the app's costs. "I have secure funding via various grants until the end of 2029 and I'm fairly confident that other funding opportunities will come up for the time after that," he wrote. The grants come from NLnet, which has backed three separate Conversations-related projects, and from the European Commission through the mobifree.org program.

The immediate trigger was Google's cut of Play Store sales. "Google takes a 15% cut on my app sales. This effectively means I'm paying Google more than 1000 Euro per year for their services," Gultsch wrote. He said Conversations had been removed from the Play Store twice over the years, including once when, in his words, "Google just randomly accused me of uploading users' contacts, which simply wasn't true." He did not give dates for either removal. Review times had also stretched out: "At the time of writing this blog post, I've been waiting 14 days for Google to review an app update," he wrote.

F-Droid, the free-software Android app repository, is now the only place to get new versions. Gultsch said the F-Droid build "is now built reproducibly and signed with my personal signing key," rather than a key F-Droid's own infrastructure controlled. The catalog lists the current release as version 2.20.3, added Sept. 18, 2026.

The signing change shifts who a user has to trust. Previously, F-Droid compiled Conversations from source itself and signed the resulting APK with F-Droid's own key, so an install depended on F-Droid's build pipeline rather than on Gultsch directly. A reproducible build lets anyone recompile the same source code and confirm the output matches the APK F-Droid distributes, byte for byte. Gultsch listed the change alongside the Google Play exit in the same post.

Channel	Developer's cut	Status as of Sept. 24, 2026
Google Play	15 percent (over 1,000 euro a year)	Discontinued
F-Droid	None	Sole distribution channel

Conversations is best known in the XMPP community for pushing OMEMO end-to-end encryption into wider use; developer Andreas Straub built an early implementation during the Google Summer of Code program in 2015, according to Wikipedia's entry on the software. The project is listed in the Free Software Foundation's software directory and is developed on Codeberg under the GPL-3.0 license.

Gultsch did not say what happens to the roughly 100,000-plus installs his Play Store listing had accumulated over the years, or whether those users will see an in-app notice to switch to F-Droid before Play Store updates stop arriving altogether. For now, the F-Droid 2.0 release he is relying on is itself less than two weeks old, and Conversations joins a growing list of apps citing Google Play's own review delays as a reason to look elsewhere.