Conversations Makes Itself Free on Google Play After 12 Years

Daniel Gultsch, the developer of the federated Android chat app Conversations, made the app free on Google Play on Sept. 24, ending a paid-download model that had run since the app's public release on March 24, 2014. He marked the date himself, writing in a post announcing the change that it fell exactly twelve and a half years after that launch.

Conversations is a client for XMPP, an open messaging protocol also known as Jabber. Gultsch wrote that charging for a compiled Android binary while keeping the source code public was an unusual business model when he started it in 2014. For a decade, he wrote, that Play Store revenue was his main income: "It pays my rent," he used to say.

What the 15 percent fee actually cost him

Gultsch put a number on the arrangement he ended. Google takes 15 percent of Conversations' sales, which he wrote amounts to more than 1,000 euros a year, or one and a half times what he pays for home internet access.

Figure	Amount
Google's cut of Play Store sales	15%
Gultsch's estimated annual cost	more than 1,000 EUR
Wait for a Google review at time of writing	14 days
Times Conversations was pulled from Play	2
Grant funding secured through	end of 2029

At the time he wrote the post, he had been waiting 14 days for Google to approve a routine update, a delay he said has grown worse over the past year, which he attributed partly to Google's own push into AI-generated apps flooding the review queue. He wrote that Google treats a security patch the same as a cosmetic feature update, which he called dangerous once a wait runs past a week or two.

Two removals and an accusation he calls false

Conversations has been pulled from the Play Store twice, according to the post. One removal followed what Gultsch described as an incorrect claim that the app was uploading users' contacts, which he said was not tied to any specific update. He linked to a 2024 post on his Mastodon account describing the incident at the time.

Grants replaced the Play Store paycheck

Gultsch wrote that his income shifted over the years from paid custom development work toward grants, including three separate awards from NLnet and funding routed through the European Commission's mobifree.org program. He said that money now covers his work through the end of 2029, which is what let him stop treating Play Store revenue as necessary.

F-Droid becomes the front door

Conversations has been listed on F-Droid, a free-software Android app repository, since early in its history, but Gultsch did not advertise that option while the Play Store version was paid. He wrote that F-Droid is now "the primary method of distributing the app," built reproducibly and signed with his own key instead of Google's. The app carries a GPL-3.0-only license and its source is hosted on Codeberg, according to Wikipedia's entry on the software, which also records that Google had logged more than 100,000 installs of the app as of November 2020.

It is not the only recent case of a software maker rethinking who controls distribution and pricing. Qualcomm this month got Ubuntu certified on its Snapdragon X2 laptops, building a path outside the two mobile operating systems it usually ships alongside, and Microsoft said Sept. 25 that only 7 percent of Copilot seats have converted to its paid Autopilot tier, a reminder that charging for software stays hard even for a company that owns its own store.

Gultsch did not say whether he would eventually remove the Play Store listing entirely. His grants run through 2029; what happens to Conversations' relationship with Google after a decade of paid-app habits fully unwinds is still unwritten.