A store of my own

The bottleneck on shipping small games was never building them. It was getting them onto the phone. Every new build meant a cable, adb, and the same dance of sideloading an APK by hand. So before the games, I built the store.

Smereski Apps is a private app store that carries only my software and lives entirely on my own network. A Flutter client pulls a live catalog over Tailscale, shows a grid of apps with search, screenshots, and versions, and installs with a tap — download the APK, hand it to the Android installer, done. An updates screen diffs what is installed against the catalog and offers one-tap upgrades when a new build lands. No Play Store, no review queue, no account, no five-day wait. Publishing is one command from inside any project directory: it builds the release APK, signs it if it has to, uploads it, and upserts the catalog entry. A thing finished on Saturday is on the home screen Saturday night.

Once putting something on the phone cost one command, the games came fast. Casino Smereski is a two-game card room — blackjack and Jacks-or-Better video poker off a single chip wallet that persists between sessions, three felt themes, the dealer rules you usually cannot see exposed as settings. or9.space is a Godot strategy game with one unbroken zoom: it opens on a deckhand hand-mining ore for credits, hands you your first ship broke, and runs the ladder up to an empire commanding fleets across persistent theaters that keep fighting whether you watch or not. G2 Balatro is a full Balatro — thirty jokers, the real chips-times-mult engine, a shop, boss blinds, save and resume — running on a pair of smart glasses at 576 by 288 monochrome, played by the gestures the glasses report.

That last one only exists because trying it was nearly free. A Balatro for smart glasses is a bad idea by every normal measure — niche hardware, a postage-stamp monochrome display, no pointer. It got built anyway, because the cost to put it in front of myself and find out was a single command instead of an afternoon. Cheap distribution does not just move what you make faster. It changes what you are willing to make at all.

The store is the boring half and the important half, and the games are downstream of it. Build the road first and the traffic shows up — weirder traffic than you would have planned for, which is the point.