EF-Map is now on the Google Play Store as a closed test. If you play EVE Frontier and own an Android phone, you can help ship it — details at the bottom, and it costs you nothing. This post is the story of how the app came to exist: why converting EF-Map to Android turned out to be the easy part, why the Play Console paperwork was not, and how we're being upfront about the one thing the app does differently from the website — pricing.
A decision that paid off eight months later
Way back near the start of this project, we made a layout rule that seemed almost paranoid at the time: the map is the star of the show, and no panel is allowed to take up more than roughly a third of a landscape screen. Every tool — routing, search, system intelligence, the killboard — had to live in a narrow column floating over the live map.
The quiet motivation was always in the back of the mind: if EF-Map ever went mobile, panels shaped like that are already phone-shaped. We would never need to condense a desktop experience down to a phone. We would just take the same panels and surface them differently.
That bet paid off in June, when we built the mobile browser experience by hosting the existing desktop panels inside a phone-friendly shell — bottom navigation, swipeable sheets, the same live 3D map underneath. We wrote that story up at the time in Making EF-Map Usable on Phones Without Rebuilding It. And it paid off again this month, because once the mobile web experience existed, "make an Android app" stopped being a rebuild and became a packaging exercise.
What the app actually is
The Android app is a Trusted Web Activity (TWA) — Google's sanctioned way for a site owner to publish their own web app on the Play Store. A tiny native shell launches ef-map.com fullscreen in your phone's own Chrome engine: no browser bar, no address field, real app icon, real Play Store install. A cryptographic handshake (a file on our domain listing the app's signing keys) proves we own both the app and the site, which is what convinces Android to drop the browser chrome.
The consequences of that architecture are the best part:
- The app IS the live site. Every feature, fix, and data update ships to app users the moment we deploy the website — no app store releases, no waiting for review, no version skew.
- Rendering is identical to mobile Chrome: the same WebGL starfield, the same performance, the same service worker.
- Store releases are only ever needed for native-shell changes — realistically once a year for API-level bumps.
Building that package — keystore, signing, manifest, the billing bridge — took an afternoon. The bet from eight months ago meant the product side was already done.
The honest bit: pricing
The website is free and stays free. Open ef-map.com in your phone's browser and you get the exact same mobile experience the app delivers. Nothing moved behind a paywall.
The Play Store app carries a small monthly subscription — £0.99. So why would anyone pay for a wrapper around a free site? Two reasons, and we would rather state them plainly than have anyone discover them by surprise.
First, the app is the delivery vehicle for phone-native features the browser can't do well. Top of the roadmap: push notifications driven by EF-Map's live blockchain indexer. Your structure comes under attack, your phone buzzes — even with the app closed. That class of feature needs an installed app with real notification permissions, and it's the actual reason the app exists.
Second, Play billing has to be baked in from day one. Retrofitting subscriptions into a published free app is somewhere between painful and impossible, and EVE Frontier changes every week — the subscription funds EF-Map keeping pace with it. Doing the one-time setup now, while the app is brand new, was the only sensible order of operations.
The part nobody warns you about
Here's the surprise of the whole project: writing the app was hours; publishing it was the grind. For anyone considering shipping their own companion app, this is the honest accounting.
Becoming a Google Play developer costs $25, which is the trivial part. Then comes identity verification with photo ID, a payments profile, bank account verification by micro-deposit, and a US tax treaty interview — all before the console will take you seriously. Then the app itself needs: a content rating questionnaire, a data safety declaration (what you collect, why, whether it's shared — and your answers must match your privacy policy), declarations for ads, health, government affiliation and financial features, a store listing with pixel-exact graphic specs, and a contact page that legally must show a phone number to EU users because a subscription makes you a "trader" under consumer law.
That was three to four hours of forms, toggles and legal declarations — not to publish the app, just to reach a closed test. And the console's navigation has drifted from Google's own documentation, so half the battle was finding where settings had moved to.
One more hurdle worth knowing about: new personal developer accounts cannot publish to the public store at all until they've run a closed test with at least 12 testers continuously opted in for 14 days. It's a sensible anti-spam policy, and it's also exactly why this post ends with a request.
Help us ship it — join the closed test
This is where you come in. We need testers — the more the better, since dropouts reset their own 14-day clocks. Here's the deal:
- You get the full EF-Map app free during the test: live 3D star map of all 24,000+ systems, routing, system intelligence, killboard.
- You will not be charged. Testers are registered with Google's sandbox billing — the subscription screen offers a "test card (always approves)" and no real money exists anywhere in the flow.
- All we need: the Gmail address your phone's Play Store is signed into (check the Play Store app → profile icon → the email at the top), then a one-tap opt-in and install. After that, just keep it installed for the 14+ day window.
To join: email your Play Store Gmail address to [email protected] with the subject "Android test", or find the recruitment thread in the EVE Frontier Discord's builder-showcase channel. We'll add you to the tester list and send you the opt-in link.
Once the test window completes and Google grants production access, EF-Map goes live on the Play Store for everyone — and the notifications work begins. If you've ever wanted your phone to tell you your Frontier assets are in trouble, this test is how it gets built.