Show Java has been downloaded just past a million times by August 2022. The last meaningful release I cut was in early 2019.
The app decompiles Android APKs on the phone itself. Point it at an installed app, get back the Java source and the layouts. I started it in late 2013 when I was eighteen and didn't know any better, shipped v1.0 in January 2014, watched it get featured on the XDA Portal, rewrote it twice (once for v2 in 2015, once for v3 in late 2018), and stopped touching it in 2019. The Play Store listing crossed into the 1,000,000+ bucket some time in the last year. Three and a half years after the last update, downloads are still climbing.
The name does a lot of work. "Show Java" is what you would type into Google if you wanted to see the Java code inside an APK, which meant accidental SEO ran in my favour for years. The XDA Portal feature in January 2014 sent a first wave of users and a small army of XDA forum people who told their friends. Once those two things stacked, the Play Store listing started ranking for "decompile apk" without me writing a single line of marketing copy. And nothing else in that niche on Android actually worked. There were a couple of thin wrappers around JaDX that crashed on most APKs, and a handful of dead projects on F-Droid. Show Java had three decompilers, resource extraction, and a source browser, and it actually finished decompiling. That was, for about five years, sufficient to be the only credible option on a phone.
Stopping is the more boring story, and more honest. The day job at a fintech ate the time I used to spend on this. The Play Store kept raising the target SDK floor and changing the rules around storage & permissions: scoped storage in Android 10, more in Android 11, foreground service restrictions in Android 12. Every twelve months a new compatibility shim to write or risk de-listing. Android fragmentation meant every new version release brought a fresh wave of one-star reviews from devices I had never seen and OEM skins I had never tested. The rating treadmill ate at me; the app had been at four-and-a-half stars for years, and keeping it there required answering complaints and shipping fixes faster than I had time for. I just stopped opening Android Studio for it, and then enough months passed that opening it again would have meant a week of catching up to the platform before I could even ship a bug fix.
The original app icon was the classic Java coffee cup, redrawn with an eye on the front of the cup. I thought it was clever. Oracle's legal team thought it was a trademark infringement, and one quiet weekday I got a notice telling me to take it down. Fair enough, that one was on me. I redesigned the icon to a generic blue-and-orange thing that did not imply anything about Java or Oracle, pushed the update, and the world moved on.
The app is still on the store in most regions. The US listing is gone the last time I checked, and I do not know when that happened or why. I have not logged into the Play Console in long enough that finding out would be its own afternoon. Downloads keep coming in from everywhere else, more this year than last, mostly from search. The version on Play right now is the one I cut in March 2019. There is a half-rewritten v4 sitting in a branch that uses Kotlin coroutines and dynamic feature modules, and I have not opened it in over a year.