Built by an indie dev who hit the same wall.
DroidSquad is a community of Android devs helping each other ship through Google Play's closed testing. It exists because I needed it and couldn't find it.
Why DroidSquad exists
I'm Gabriel — solo indie dev, no team, no company, just me and a personal Google Play Console account. Last month I was finishing an Android app and hit the wall every dev with a post-Nov-2023 personal account hits: 12 opted-in testers, 14 consecutive days, before Google lets you push to production. No 12 humans on hand. No mailing list. No colleagues with Android phones I could lean on.
I tried the obvious paths. Fiverr listings promising 12 testers in 24 hours — I didn't trust the engagement wouldn't be emulator-flagged. Cold-asking on r/androiddev — got 0 replies and a removed post for the trouble. Telegram swap groups — chaos, ghosts mid-cycle, no way to know if anyone actually checked in. The paid testing services felt transactional in a way that didn't match the actual situation: I'm an indie dev, the people I want testing my app are other indie devs who get it.
So I built the thing I wished existed. A community where devs help each other clear the wall, with a transparent dashboard so nobody is wondering whether the check-ins are real. That's DroidSquad.
What I'm building
The product is young — 5 days in public as I write this — so I'm being honest about what's here vs. what's still rough. What works today: a real-time engagement dashboard so devs see every tester check-in as it happens, FingerprintJS device verification on every tester signup so you know real humans are on real Android devices, AES-256-GCM encryption for any Play Console service-account JSON a dev uploads, an append-only audit log behind the admin surface, and the daily 14-day check-in flow that proves tester engagement to Google.
What's rough: the community is small. The flywheel works better with more devs in it. If you join now, you join early — the upside is you get heard, the downside is you're early.
How DroidSquad sustains itself
The community path is free. Devs help devs because every tester is a future dev who'll need the favor returned. That's DroidCoin — earn it by testing, spend it when your turn comes. No subscriptions, no upsell wall.
If you've got a deadline this week, there's an expedited path ($5) that uses a dedicated dev pool to test in 24 hours. That's the only thing anyone pays for. It's optional, it's small, and it's honest about what it is — not a premium tier, just a fast lane for people in a hurry.
No VC, no investors, no growth-at-all-costs pressure shaping the roadmap. The whole thing runs on a home server in my apartment fronted by a Cloudflare Tunnel. Postgres in Docker. Next.js standalone build. Magic-link auth via Resend or Gmail SMTP depending on the day. Sentry catching what I miss. I tell you the infra because the indie dev audience deserves to know — "self-hosted on a $300 mini-PC" is a real answer to "what happens if they go bust": nothing fancy goes bust here, the code is just code.
This is the thing I wish existed when I was stuck.
Not a tester farm. Not a Fiverr gig. A community of indie Android devs who remember exactly what it feels like to be 12 testers short of shipping — and show up for each other anyway.
Get in touch
Email me directly at [email protected]. If something's broken, the bug widget at the bottom of every page goes straight to my inbox — I read all of them.
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