The Paperwork (and Money) Between Me and Twenty People

It started with Google deciding that sideloading needed a gate. Not Play Store curation — that's old news, that's the deal you always made with the Store. This is different: I own the phone. I paid for it. Android's entire decade-long pitch against Apple was built on the idea that owning the hardware meant you got to decide what ran on it, not a walled garden deciding for you — that's the whole reason "hand a friend an APK and they install it" used to just work. Now the operating system itself checks whether the developer behind that APK has been vetted before it'll let you use the thing you bought. Doesn't matter if you're on the Store. Doesn't matter if you're one guy sharing a game with one friend. The OS checks first. That's the thing that kicked all of this off. Everything after is just what happens when you go looking for the exit and find out there isn't one — there's a fee, on top of the one I already paid years ago to be a Play developer.

I wanted to publish a mobile game and share it with maybe twenty people to start. That's it. That used to be an afternoon's worth of settings. Instead I found my existing developer account already locked — not locked-until-you-publish, locked from doing anything at all — until I picked a door. Door one: verify as an individual, which means my legal name and home address go on public display the moment anything I make reaches another human being. Door two: become a business, which means a D-U-N-S number, which means Dun & Bradstreet wants a "Principal Name," which means I'm now filling out paperwork designed for companies that have investors, to cover a Twitch channel that peaks at ten viewers, and hobbies.

So I started looking into building the business — not because I wanted one, but because the system stopped offering a category for "person, not entity." I never actually finished it. Bought the domains, spent real hours down a legal rabbit hole, and that's the entire spend — no money changed hands beyond that. There is no privacy tier between "total stranger has your street address" and "LLC with a registered agent." You either hand over everything or you incorporate. I tried the shortcut first — Clerky, assuming it would just form an LLC for me — and got bounced with a Delaware corporate-suffix error, because it turns out Clerky doesn't do LLCs at all. It does venture-backed Delaware C-corps, exclusively, for people raising money from people I will never meet. I was trying to keep my address off the internet. Different problem entirely, same form.

Once I understood the actual shape of it, some of it got almost funny. Delaware is the default answer to "how do I start a business" mostly because it's the default answer to "how do I start a business" — a reputation built for VC-backed corporations, repeated endlessly by formation companies that profit from selling Delaware paperwork to people who will never see the inside of a courtroom, let alone the Chancery. Nebraska, where I actually live, already keeps member names off its public LLC filings for free. I didn't need Wyoming. I didn't need New Mexico. I needed a hundred-dollar filing and a registered agent willing to eat the address exposure for me, and the state does the rest quietly, no extra jurisdiction required. The entire internet's worth of "form in Wyoming for privacy" advice turns out to be actively wrong for someone in my very ordinary situation: a person who lives and works where they live and work.

Then came the part where I realized privacy and liability protection are sold as one feature and aren't. Liability protection requires acting like a separate entity — a real bank account, no commingled funds, actual recordkeeping — or a court sees straight through the paperwork the first time it matters. Privacy doesn't require any of that; it's baked into the filing itself, free, the moment the entity exists. Which meant sitting with an uncomfortable question I hadn't planned to ask myself: if this runs at a loss, for fun, for free — do I actually want the liability shield badly enough to do the bookkeeping, or do I just want my name off my house? Those are two different purchases. Nobody tells you that up front, because nobody selling you the LLC benefits from you knowing you might only need half of it.

And then, after I'd mentally built the entire structure — LLC, registered agent, EIN, a DBA for the streaming name and one for the studio — I hit the detail that made the whole exercise feel absurd: I've been Demortes for years. Google already knows who that is. Data brokers already have my address filed under it, scraped from somewhere I don't even remember, sitting on sites that don't answer to Nebraska because they were never Nebraska's to regulate in the first place. You can't unbuild a person you already were on the internet, to strangers who found you a decade ago. Everything I was constructing only stops new leaks. It does nothing about the ones already sitting in a database between here and a server that answers to no state's attorney general.

None of that was ever the point, though. The point is that I just want to be a developer. Not a company. Not a "Principal." Not an entity with a registered agent and a biennial filing and a hobby-loss defense ready in case the IRS asks why I've never turned a profit doing this for fun. A developer — the thing you used to just be the moment you wrote something and gave it to someone else. Somewhere between here and there, the platforms decided that distinction doesn't exist anymore: you're either invisible to twenty people or you're a business, and the gate that made that true wasn't a business decision I made. It was one Google made, about my phone, before I ever opened Play Console. It's the same shape as a printer that rejects a third-party cartridge, or a tractor that won't let the person who bought it replace a sensor without a dealer's blessing — the industry decided somewhere along the way that ownership is a subscription now, not a transaction, and it's apparently coming for app development too.

I still don't have the DUNS number. The LLC isn't finished. The app isn't in front of my one friend yet. But I know now that none of the infrastructure I almost built was actually about the size of what I'm making. It was about how much the thing standing between me and the twenty people I wanted to reach needed to know about me first. I still think I should get to just own the thing I bought.