APKCube is a free APK download service for Android. We make it easy to get the apps you want: current releases, older versions, and per-architecture variants. Nothing here asks you to sign in, and the phone you install on doesn't need the Play Store.
Play doesn't always hand the file over. An app can be limited to a handful of countries, flagged incompatible with your model, held back behind a staged rollout, or pulled from the store outright. None of that says anything about whether you're allowed to run it. Free apps we can fetch, the same way a phone fetches them. Paid ones we can't: Google releases a purchase only to the account that bought it, so those pages send you to the store instead.
Sometimes it isn't the app that is out of reach but the store. In a number of countries the government blocks Google Play, or blocks enough of Google that the store never loads, and a phone there cannot fetch even a free app that was never restricted to it. That is a large part of why this site exists. What we hand over is the same file Play would have delivered, reachable from a plain web page instead of a store that has been walled off. Which apps a person gets to run shouldn't be decided by where they happen to be.
Every file goes through the same two checks before it is offered. One is a malware scan across the engines behind VirusTotal. The other reads the signing certificate out of the APK and compares it with the certificates the rest of that package's history was signed with. A developer's key doesn't change quietly, so a build signed with a different one is something the page tells you rather than hides. Both results sit next to the SHA-256 on the download page, and anything the scanners call malicious is refused instead of served.
An update isn't automatically an improvement. A new build can drop your Android version, break on your hardware, or remove the one feature you were there for. So a new release doesn't replace the old one here: earlier builds stay on the app's Old versions page with their dates, sizes and signatures. Going back is a fresh install, because Android won't put an older build over a newer one, but the file is there when you need it.
Downloading is free and needs no account; the ads on the page pay for the bandwidth. If a download is broken, an app is missing, or the version you need isn't listed, the contact page reaches us. Most of what gets fixed here started as one of those messages.