The next step after you’ve made a cool app for Android is to make money on it. You may choose a common way to pay $25 and get to Google Play. But there is plenty of various options. Each of them has its own users who may bring you lots of installs.

Some of the listed stores have a little bit smaller audience but others are more localized. Some of them don’t even need the payment for admitting an app on the store. So it would be a great advantage to have your app listed in different stores.

1. Amazon Appstore

Amazon is the major competitor of Google. It offers the Kindle Fire, the Fire Phone, Android-powered devices, Fire OS. Despite the custom OS, a majority of Android apps will work OK on Fire OS.

There is a possibility to add HTML5 and web apps on the Amazon Appstore. There are more than 240,000 apps. They also offer some free apps as a special feature. Get acquainted with Amazon’s developer portal.

2. SlideME

It’s quite an old market and it’s even older than Google Play. It’s installed on more than 50% of Android devices. It requires a payment of 20% and suggests a great many payment options. Unlike Google Play, it has a PayPal payment option. Sometimes, publishing your app on SlideME may bring you more installs than if your app was on Google Play. So, it’s worth trying.

3. 1Mobile Market

The peculiarity of 1Mobile Market is that it publishes only free apps. But you shouldn’t turn it down because of that. It’s free to upload your app but there exists an approval process that every app has to pass. It won’t be a problem as long as your app doesn’t have any malware.

1Mobile Market can boast having 100 million installs and more than 800,000 apps in the list. It recommends apps to users according to their preferences which is quite helpful.

4. Samsung Galaxy Apps

Being one of the biggest manufacturers of Android devices, Samsung has an app store of its own – Samsung Galaxy Apps. It’s preinstalled on all the devices of Samsung Galaxy series which means that it has an impressive base of users. The only con is that only 13,000 apps are available in the store. It’s a pretty small amount.

5. Mobile9

Mobile9 is a great store to think of as an alternative to Google Play as it has 40+ million users. They can both share and write reviews on the apps they’ve installed and used. It’s like an app social network. One more advantage of Mobile9 is that it’s free to publish your apps there. There are 200 million installs each month and 30,000 developers. So does it deserve a try?

6. Opera Mobile Store

Opera Mobile Store also offers to publish your app for free. Though developers get only 70% from paid apps. Opera has agreed with Yandex, one of the biggest Russian search engines, to show Opera’s apps in the Yandex App Store and vice versa. It contains more than 200,000 apps, 100+ million visitors every month and 2 million installs every day.

7. Mobango

Mobango publishes your apps for free. There are millions of users and thousands of installs per day. So it’s a great option to consider as it contains 100,000 apps now.

8. Soc.io Mall

Soc.io Mall describes itself as “The Android Mall that Loves Developers”. Publishing your app is free and revenue share is pretty high (80/20). There are a little bit less than 10,000 apps now. But Soc.io Mall is not about apps only. It also has games and ebooks. They will soon have videos, music, and audiobooks to offer. There aren’t many active users in the store, but at the same time the competition is significantly lower.

9. F-droid

On F-droid there are free and open-source apps only. There are 2 ways to get an app: to download it from the official website or via F-droid app. A great pro of this app is that it can automatically update every app you’ve installed using it. It must be mentioned that it’s maintained by volunteers and the bills are paid from donations. In order to get on the F-droid your app should have an Apache or GNU open source license. They allow apps that have paid add-ons or ads but they shouldn’t be on display to be the default.

10. GetJar

30+ million users enjoy GetJar. There’s a service of recommendation like in 1Mobile.

It has 3 million installs per day and 70,000 apps. They want developers to use freemium model. GetJar encourages them to use ads and in-app currency as an alternative for charging for the app. Their peculiarity is that they offer the biggest virtual currency on Google Play, GetJar Gold. More than 100 million users have access to it.

You can publish and sell your Android app on many stores. As you see, there are both advantages and disadvantages to each. None of them may be an absolute replacement for Google Play. But still, they can provide your more installs and more potential users. And the most important – they’re free. So it will be useful to look them through carefully.