May 8, 2026
Stars, scars, and store wars
I built GitHub Store to 12,500 stars in 6 months – I started at 16
Teen builds app store hit—and the comments instantly turn into a copyright and malware cage match
TLDR: A teen built an alternative app store after getting frustrated with Google’s slow process, and it exploded in popularity fast. But the comments stole the show, with people fighting over trademark trouble, safety fears, and whether those flashy star numbers mean anything at all.
A 17-year-old from Uzbekistan just dropped the kind of origin story the internet loves: he got annoyed by Google Play’s long approval maze, built his own simpler download shop on top of GitHub, and somehow racked up 12,500 stars in six months. That’s the flashy headline. But in the comments, the crowd immediately turned this from a feel-good underdog story into a full-on popcorn thread.
The biggest mood? “Cool story, but hold on…” One camp was impressed that a teenager shipped a cross-device app so fast, especially with no AI coding helpers. The other camp came in swinging. One commenter flatly said using “GitHub” in the name is a bad idea, while another twisted the knife by asking if the same AI tools he bragged about not using would’ve warned him about trademarks. Ouch. Then came the skeptics who treated the big star count like fake Hollywood box office numbers, arguing stars are a weak vanity metric that can be gamed and don’t prove real value.
And because no internet launch is complete without fear and snark, someone asked the obvious scary question: how do you stop malware? Another commenter went even more chaotic, declaring GitHub would be better off if it deleted stars entirely. Meanwhile, the funniest drive-by of all was a reader who ignored the product drama and simply rage-quit over the writing style: too many em-dashes, no thanks. In other words, the app may be rising fast, but the real store was the comment section—and business is booming.
Key Points
- •The author says he built GitHub Store after deciding that Google Play publication requirements were too burdensome for a small Android side project.
- •According to the article, GitHub Store reached 12,500+ GitHub stars, served 250,000+ updates, supports 13 languages, and runs on Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux within six months.
- •The author says he chose Kotlin Multiplatform because it allowed him to reuse his existing Android development experience with Kotlin and Compose across desktop platforms.
- •He says the first MVP shipped in one week without coding agents and included GitHub Releases search, asset filtering, Android tap-to-install, and a shared UI codebase.
- •The article attributes early growth to LinkedIn posts, the Kotlin Slack community, and a feature by HowToMen, and notes that GitHub Store added Obtainium import/export compatibility.