Direct Download APK?

Thanks for sharing your question with us @monomadic! I'm sorry to read that you've found our previous responses to be less than satisfying, but hopefully I can provide some more context with this reply.

You are correct that we currently only distribute 1Password for Android through the Google Play Store. The reason for this up until now is that the vast majority of Android devices ship with the Google Play Store and Google Play Services installed. Since this is also where almost all of our customers are, this is where we have focused our efforts.

In recent years though, there does seem to be a trend towards unbundling of Google Play Services from a number of alternative Android distributions. And for at least one manufacturer, Google Play Services can no longer be bundled with their devices. The result is that an increasing number of our customers are using devices that don't have Google Play on them.

While making an APK available for direct download would certainly allow us to serve customers on those devices, it doesn't come without its own share of challenges. We currently utilize Google Play in-app payments to set up 1Password subscriptions, so we need an alternative payment flow that works well for mobile. It's especially critical to keep security apps up-to-date, so we need a mechanism for detecting, fetching, and applying updates with as little friction as possible. Some optional features such as QR code scanning and FIDO2 security key support currently rely on Google Play Services, and need to be implemented using different technology stacks in order to provide feature parity between the Google Play version and a directly distributed version.

None of these issues is insurmountable, but they all come with increased development cost. Having versions of the app that are implemented differently also increases the number of things that can possibly go wrong, which means that we need to invest more time and effort into testing as well. With that in mind, I can say that this is something that we're looking into, but I would also caution that it's not something that we expect to be able to offer in the near future. That's not necessarily the answer you were looking for, but I hope it provides more context than you had previously. Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!