Luis Garrido

In 2002, two Computer Engineering students at the University of Malaga built a website to share software downloads with friends. One of them was Luis Hernandez Garrido. The other was Jose "Pepe" Dominguez. They called it Uptodown. Nobody gave them money. Nobody told them to keep going. Twenty-four years later, their site serves 130 million people every month - more monthly active users than many countries have internet connections.

The app store wars have been running for years, fueled by billions in venture capital and armies of lawyers. Luis runs the whole counter-offensive from a renovated office in Malaga, Spain (and increasingly from Berkeley, California), with a team of 54. He's not catching up to Google and Apple. He built something they never considered worth copying - a platform where nobody asks for your credit card, nobody geoblocks your device, and every app version ever published is still there, waiting for you to download it.

The timing was accidental and then deliberate. Uptodown launched distributing Windows software. When Android arrived and the mobile revolution hit, Luis and Pepe recognized something the industry missed: people would want to install apps outside the official channels. Not because they were doing anything wrong. Because they wanted to choose. By 2011, Uptodown had pivoted hard into Android. By 2016, the platform had cleared 100 million monthly users. By 2017, it ranked among the world's top 100 websites.

Luis's position on this is not a PR stance. Uptodown doesn't sell user data. It doesn't require registration. It doesn't restrict access based on geography or device manufacturer. It lets you download the specific version of an app you want - a detail so useful it sounds trivial until your bank's latest Android update breaks your phone. These aren't features. They're the whole point.

Luis's Harvard Extension School certificate in Sustainable Product Design - earned in 2014 - reads like a tell. Computer engineering trained him to build systems. Product design trained him to think about who the system is for. The result is a platform that runs quietly in the background of hundreds of millions of people's digital lives, without demanding anything from them in return.

When the European Digital Markets Act came into force in March 2024, requiring Apple and Google to allow alternative app stores, Luis was the person journalists should have been calling. He's been running an alternative app store for two decades. He knows exactly how hard it is, exactly where the gatekeepers apply pressure, and exactly what a genuinely open ecosystem would look like. Uptodown joined the Coalition for App Fairness the same year, adding a practitioner's voice to what had been a largely theoretical advocacy debate.

The 54-person team is a number worth sitting with. Uptodown serves 300 million files per month. Its native Android app has 8 million monthly active users. Its catalog contains 3.8 million apps. Every file gets scanned through VirusTotal using 70+ security engines before publication. That's an extraordinary volume of work for a company the size of a medium restaurant. Luis has publicly credited his team's initiative and ownership culture as the reason it works: "Anyone can have the initiative to promote changes and improvements."

The Great Place to Work certification Uptodown earned in 2023-2024 - with 100% of employees reporting it as a great workplace - isn't something Luis would lead with in a pitch deck. It's simply what happens when the person running a company actually means what they say about team culture. Uptodown operates without formal hierarchies blocking ideas from reaching the top.