Daniel Gultsch started building Conversations, a federated XMPP messaging client for Android, in a student dormitory in January 2014. Within weeks he was dogfooding it with friends; by March he released it on Google Play as a paid app with publicly available source code. The model — open source but charging for the compiled binary — was unusual in 2014 but worked. For over a decade, Conversations has been his primary income source. The revenue mix shifted over the years. Early on, paid custom development for companies wanting XMPP integration carried the load. Consulting on messaging and security topics supplemented that. Later, grants from NLnet and the European Commission became increasingly central. Through all of it, Play Store revenue remained the steadiest line item — the thing that paid rent when invoices were months apart and grant disbursements came only at project end. But the relationship with Google was adversarial from the start. App updates rejected for incomprehensible reasons. Conversations removed from the Play Store twice — once on a fabricated accusation of uploading user contacts that was simply false. No human to talk to. No five-minute phone call to clear up misunderstandings that an AI reviewer or click worker created. At the time of his departure, Gultsch had been waiting 14 days for Google to review an update. He notes that Google makes no distinction between feature updates and security updates, meaning critical patches sit in the same review queue as cosmetic changes. The economics are clarifying. Google takes a 15% cut on app sales, costing Gultsch over €1,000 per year. For that price, he notes, his ISP sends a human to his house when the internet breaks. His laptop manufacturer does the same. Google offers no human contact whatsoever. The asymmetry is structural: the developer pays for a service whose provider is unreachable, unaccountable, and increasingly slow — partly because Google's own AI tools have flooded the Play Store with slop apps that clog the review pipeline. The exit became possible because the funding base shifted. Gultsch now has secure grant funding through 2029 via NLnet and the European Commission, including through the Mobifree project. F-Droid, originally a secondary distribution channel he didn't even link from the official website, is now the primary method. The F-Droid APK is built reproducibly and signed with his personal key — a stronger trust guarantee than Google Play ever provided. Conversations is now free on F-Droid. The Play Store listing, if it survives Google's review process, becomes an afterthought. Gultsch's parting sentiment — 'Fuck the gatekeepers' — is earned through twelve years of paying a toll to a landlord who wouldn't answer the door. The story illustrates a pattern: platform dependency is a trap that feels like stability until you find an alternative funding source. The broader signal is about European public funding as an escape valve from American platform extraction. NLnet, the European Commission, and projects like Mobifree are doing something the market alone cannot: funding open-source infrastructure that competes with proprietary gatekeepers. Whether this model scales beyond individual developers to sustain entire ecosystems is the open question.
