The Future of Accrescent

Accrescent is a novel Android app store focused on security, privacy, and usability. We’ve been building Accrescent since 2021 to improve the security and freedom of everyday Android users by providing an alternative to Google Play which doesn’t compromise on technical excellence and protecting our users. Aligned with this mission, over 42,000 people worldwide trust Accrescent to deliver their apps safely. Now, we need your help to continue.

Accrescent has always been free to use because we believe security shouldn’t have to come at a price. We also understand we’re trusted by our users to secure a sensitive and significant portion of their lives — the apps they use — so we’ve built Accrescent transparently, making our code open source so others can run and inspect it as they please.

From the beginning, we’ve been funded purely by donations from generous users who want to sponsor Accrescent’s development and ensure its long-term viability. This approach has so far been successful; incoming donations completely cover Accrescent’s server costs while I (Accrescent’s lead developer) work on Accrescent in my spare time (usually out of my own pocket). However, this model cannot sustain forever: in 3 months, we will no longer have enough resources to continue ongoing feature development without additional funding. But there is a way forward.

In this post, we hope to explain Accrescent’s status as a project, who we are, what we do, where we’re heading, and how you can help us in our mission if you find value in our work.

Where we’re at

In short: in order for Accrescent to continue advancing, we need $5,800/month in recurring donations to fund its full-time development. This work includes adding features to the Accrescent app and developer console, building new subprojects and tooling, and making improvements to Accrescent’s architecture and server infrastructure — work we currently have limited resources to do, as I can no longer afford to work on Accrescent after October with its current funding.

For the next 3 months, development will continue according to a short-term roadmap we plan to publish in a follow-up blog post next week. Also in that blog post, we will include an extensive development progress update and long-term roadmap for how we hope Accrescent can develop beyond the next 3 months.

After October, feature development will cease unless we reach our funding goal. Maintenance will continue regardless of funding on a best-effort basis, including dependency updates, security patches, and bug fixes. Accrescent will continue operating as-is since recurring donations still cover all existing server infrastructure, so apps will continue to update as usual and developers will still be able to manage and update their apps. New app submissions are unlikely to be accepted to Accrescent for the time being.

If you’re interested in helping out, head over to our donation page and make a recurring donation with GitHub Sponsors. For more information, keep reading.

A sprout in the rock

Accrescent is a fundamentally different project than its competitors, building at the intersection of strong security/privacy and sleek usability. Unlike many app stores, Accrescent doesn’t require an account to use, increasing your privacy by making it difficult to track who installs what. And unlike Google Play, we don’t require developers to hand over the keys to the castle (i.e. app signing keys) or publish sensitive personal information such as legal name and address.

We believe security is paramount to protecting people’s privacy, so we designed Accrescent differently from the start to protect your apps against malicious tampering. Once it’s on Accrescent, nobody but the developer can change it: not hackers, not our server providers — not even us. And knowing that security only succeeds when it’s easy to use, we paired our protections with extensive automation to avoid the frequent delays which plague other app stores and function efficiently while still incorporating a judicious review process to enforce quality guarantees for everyone.

These are only a few of the many attributes which make Accrescent unique among app stores, but we hope they give you a better idea of our values and the lengths we go to to ensure everyone can have a secure, private, and pleasant app store experience. But we want to go further.

Through the looking-glass

We know we’re asking for a lot of support. That’s why, to build trust and transparency, we want to explain more clearly:

1. What income we’ve been receiving
2. How we’ve been using it
3. What we’ve been working on
4. What we plan to work on

This section will briefly cover the first 2 of these items. Items (3) and (4) would take up far too much space for this post, so we’ll be publishing a second blog post on August 11th to cover them separately (and very extensively). As part of that post, we’ll be open sourcing two projects we’ve been working on in the background¹. Keep an eye out!

Income

Our income comes from two primary sources: 1) recurring and one-time GitHub Sponsors donations and 2) cryptocurrency donations. In all, these are the total average amounts we’ve received per month from GitHub Sponsors every year since we first started accepting donations:

• 2023: $87.71/mo
• 2024: $108.77/mo
• 2025: $116.50/mo

We are currently receiving $112 each month in recurring donations.

Cryptocurrency is a bit more complicated. Because the amount we receive isn’t consistent month-to-month, it’s difficult to rely on it for development work purposes. Additionally, over 85% of all cryptocurrency we’ve received to date is from only 5 donations, all of which were received only in the last 4 months. This means our cryptocurrency income is dependent upon only a few donors. However, cryptocurrency also accounts for 91%² of all donations we’ve received over the lifetime of the project, highlighting the generosity of these individuals and our supporters’ donation preferences. It is these donations which have made the next 3 months of work possible.

Here are the approximate total values of the cryptocurrencies we’ve received at the time we received them:

• 2023: $45.99
  • Monero: $45.99
• 2024: $2,707.06
  • Bitcoin: $1,150.00
  • Monero: $1,557.06
• 2025: $30,665.41
  • Bitcoin: $2,341.83
  • Ethereum: $11,885.46
  • Monero: $16,438.12

We’re extremely grateful to everyone who has contributed (and especially our large anonymous donors). You all have kept Accrescent running (and still do!) and growing smoothly, and we’re committed to stewarding your contributions well for the benefit of all Accrescent users.

Expenses

Our expenses consist primarily of cloud hosting costs along with a few other services such as email. Below are our average costs per month for each year:

• 2023: $33.53/mo
• 2024: $19.01/mo
• 2025: $51.38/mo

We are currently spending $53.53/month on our services.

To put these numbers into context, this averages out to a little over a tenth of a cent per user per month. That means a $5/month donation supports over 3,900 Accrescent users.

We do expect these costs to grow over time (and they have). Migrating to managed cloud services, new features expanding Accrescent’s architecture, and a steadily growing userbase all contribute to a slow increase in costs. But as we grow, we’re committed to running efficiently like we do today and making every dollar donated to Accrescent go as far as possible toward securing Android users globally.

All of the income exceeding our regular server expenses has gone toward sponsoring development work (including the next 3 months) and saving for future server expenses. To see specifically what we’ve been working on (and some of our plans for the future!), be sure to check out our follow-up blog post going live on August 11th.

What now?

So what now? What happens to Accrescent, and what does its future look like?

For the next 3 months, Accrescent will continue to be actively developed. We plan to release a handful of features over this timeframe which will all be detailed in our upcoming blog post. After 3 months have passed, app updates will still be accepted and distributed, bugs will be patched, and communications will continue on a best-effort basis. However, ongoing feature development will come to an end unless we reach our funding goal. This includes all planned and in-progress feature enhancements and projects.

As a sample, here are a few of the major items we would like to do:

• Add new features to the Accrescent app
  • Detailed app descriptions
  • App screenshots
  • Developer information
• Add new features to the Accrescent developer console
  • App download metrics
  • Multi-user app management teams
  • Publishing API to manage apps, teams, and listings
• Build new projects
  • Accrescent store web frontend
  • Accrescent CLI
• Make infrastructure improvements
  • Further automate deployment and scaling
  • Improve service resource efficiency (to reduce costs)
  • Zero-trust server-to-server communications

In our follow-up post going up on August 11th, we will include a much more comprehensive list, a short-term roadmap for the next 3 months, and a long-term roadmap (its work dependent upon funding) which reflects our vision for Accrescent’s future.

In the meantime, we are publishing Accrescent 0.26.0, Parcelo 0.12.0, and version 0.12.0 of our developer console with significant maintenance updates and a couple of new features such as Accrescent targeting Android 16 and the Accrescent developer console getting a Material 3 UI overhaul. We have also added new sponsor tiers to our GitHub Sponsors page to offer new ways of expressing our gratitude to our donors.

Beyond the horizon

Accrescent isn’t going anywhere yet, but for it to grow into the featureful app store we envision, we need your help. To reiterate, we need $5,800/month in recurring donations to fund full-time Accrescent development. That means if just 3% of our users each gave $5/month, we’d have enough to keep Accrescent actively developed far into the foreseeable future. If you want to contribute to the future of Accrescent, head over to our donation page and make a recurring donation with GitHub Sponsors (all donation forms are appreciated, but recurring is the most helpful for ensuring we can continue development). Feel free to email sponsor@accrescent.app if you have any donation questions or want to make other sponsorship arrangements.

If you can’t donate but still want to help, please share this post with others so Accrescent can continue to grow into the app store it was meant to be.

For now, we have enough recurring donations to keep Accrescent’s servers running with some wiggle room for growth. But we hope this is only a brief pause along the journey toward Accrescent being sustainable for the long haul, and that like a waxing crescent tracing its way along the lunar surface, so will we continue to grow, illuminating a dark world with a hope for something better. Ever secure, ever free, ever accrescent.