Pride Piano

June is upon us, the month in which companies rebrand their logos to rainbow variants in Western regions. To add to this shallowness, I have released Pride Piano on the Google Play Store.

Seeing as Google Play rejects my app if I attempt to describe its functionality in the app description, even while avoiding no-no words, and I can’t be bothered fighting with them, I’ll write here instead what it does.

It’s pretty straight-forward, really — one chord of a piano designed to match Valentino Vecchietti’s design.

There’s also a second launcher for the app which functions as an ordinary black and white piano as a decoy of sorts. This one stays in the Recent Apps section but the Pride one remains undercover. You never know when this could be useful.

This app is simply a bit of fun, freedom of expression and all that. Suffice it to say, this is not the app of choice for serious music production.

I’ve managed to keep the app under 70KB in size, and in theory it should be compatible all the way back to the very first version of Android, though I have a tough time properly testing this due to the rarity of such old devices and limited emulator support.

For the initial release, I’ve limited it to 40 countries based on what scores high in the Global Acceptance Index. A large aspect of this is simply that I don’t know what would happen if I try and publish this in Russia etc. where there exist laws against and poor public sentiment towards this sort of stuff.

If you cannot download the app from the Play Store, be it due to region-blocking or your device is too old, or perhaps you just don’t want anything to do with Google, it is also available as an APK on itch.io.

In case you are wondering, no, I’m not in the LGBT crowd myself, just one thing led to another after thinking about Bill Wurtz’ “shaving my piano” jingle. Those who are on the extremes of pro- and anti-LGBT beliefs are both deeply unhappy with my personal views, but ultimately they’re vocal minorities full of hatred. We’ll see how it goes.