This is an early announcement that APKs support will be removed in big update (which is expected around 1st January, 2022), therefore you won't be able to upload/find any APKs after the update.
What is APKs support?
If you are an old Sketchub user, you might already know that Sketchub also allowed the uploadation of APKs instead of projects. This APK support was not available in Play Store version because of their policy violations. Hence, it was only available in the original version provided from https://sketchub.in .
Why is it removed?
It is not removed yet, you are still able to distribute your APKs through Sketchub's original version until the end of 2021. It is decided to be removed because of many reasons:
- Sketchub is not good place for presenting the APKs for audience , you will get more users for your apps on Play Store (even though it is not free)
- It is becoming difficult for us to manage two versions of Sketchub (Play Store version & Original Version). Its because of Admob & Facebook's new ads policy, we can no longer implement ads on apps that are not play store, hence it will be difficult for us to monetize the original version.
- It is difficult to find malicious apps, it is always vulnerable to install unknown APKs. Sometime it takes too long to scan APKs while decompiling & testing the app in isolated environment.
- Only 6% of users are preferring to downloading APKs while comparing to the projects.
What are the alternatives?
There are many alternatives for sharing your apps
- Play Store: It is worth to pay 25$ for the developer account as it will provide resources to boost your app
- Aptoide: A free app store, that allows you to create your own store page for free
- Amazon Appstore: It also provides you free developer account
or you can Google another popular app store on your own for finding more...