Luis Hernández Garrido and the freedom inside a download button

A successful software company can do something rather awkward to a programmer: give him less time to program. Luis Hernández Garrido described the problem in 2022. Uptodown was growing, the work was becoming more complicated, and talented colleagues were joining. Its co-founder found himself going where the company needed him. The trouble was that those places did not always involve writing code.

He had discussed a similar predicament with Bernardo Quintero, the founder of VirusTotal. Advancement could pull a developer away from development; a game studio could become something to save for retirement. Hernández's advice was refreshingly impatient: do it now. He took his own advice and started Side Project Games, a small outlet for experiments alongside his day job.

There is something revealing about that choice. After years spent helping other people's software reach an audience, he wanted to make some more software himself. His personal games site describes a one-person studio working with Unity and Godot, with projects including Dungeons & Puzzles and Taverns & Cards. The scale is deliberately different. A tavern, a card game, a little room to build.

The side project gives his larger career a useful point of entry. Hernández runs an app store, but his recurring concern is the person on either side of the download: someone who made a thing, and someone who would like to use it. What happens between them has occupied much of his working life.

Two students, a catalogue, and €200

Born in Málaga in 1979, Hernández met José Domínguez while studying computer engineering at the University of Málaga. They started Uptodown in 2002, before the smartphone app store became a familiar institution. The initial business concerned desktop software. Finding, describing and downloading programs was already a useful service, even when the machine stayed on a desk.

The founders later recalled that getting the project running cost €200. That is an appealingly modest origin for a distribution business: less a ceremonial launch than a decision to begin. The amount matters chiefly because of what followed. Hernández and Domínguez kept building, and outside investment did not become the engine of their company.

In 2014, Hernández described their preference for organic growth, accepting that it moved slowly. By 2022, he said the two founders remained the only owners. Ownership shaped the company's decisions and the time available to make them. A product could develop around its users rather than around the date of the next funding round.

His account of business building is similarly unromantic. The community came first; the business developed around it. He has described Uptodown as reactive, responding to what its audience needed rather than relying on elaborate projections. The catalogue supplied a straightforward starting point. Software was proliferating. People needed help sorting through it. Their work was to make that encounter easier.

The pocket changed the business

Android gave the catalogue a different destination. In his own retrospective account, Hernández places Uptodown's move into mobile in 2011. The underlying task remained recognizable: organize software and make it accessible. The device changed, and with it the distribution rules. A download now arrived in an environment increasingly organized around stores owned by the platform companies.

Uptodown grew alongside Android while continuing to use the web as its principal route to users. In a 2023 interview, Hernández explained that a browser could be enough to obtain a file. The native store offered features such as updates, but using it was optional. That distinction gives his philosophy a practical shape. The destination need not prescribe one entrance.

An app catalogue also needs editorial work. He described reviews, screenshots, videos, tutorials and other information created by the team, giving readers something beyond a developer's own sales pitch. The task involves judgment as well as storage. A file may be available; a user still needs to understand what it does.

By March 2021, Hernández reported 130 million monthly unique users and 450 million downloads. He named India, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico among important markets, alongside countries such as Iraq, Egypt and Turkey. Those figures belong to that moment. They show how far a student project had travelled, and why a distribution model built for access could find a substantial audience outside its home country.

A city should get to make things

Málaga remained more than an address for the company. As technology businesses arrived in the city, Hernández argued for attention to the kind of industry being built. His concern was whether Málaga would develop the capacity to create products and make decisions, rather than settle into providing inexpensive development teams for companies headquartered elsewhere.

In 2022, he urged younger people to question the arrangements they inherited and to create technology themselves. His phrase was “innovación sin permiso” - innovation without permission. That fits the origins of Uptodown: a pair of students beginning with a useful idea, then learning what the work required. The ambition extends beyond attracting a recognizable company name to a local office.

His own education continued beyond the university where the business began. A published biography records further training at Harvard Business School in 2014, focused on sustainable product development. It also describes his participation in initiatives linking students and the technology industry, including Google Activate, and support for local Barcamp events.

The local and international parts of his career keep meeting. In July 2025, he wrote that he had returned to Málaga after a year in Berkeley, California. Some of the ideas he brought home came from familiar Spanish founders, including friends at Freepik. Geography had widened his perspective without making his home city's builders less relevant.

“innovación sin permiso”Luis Hernández, 2022
Innovation without permission

The boss goes away. The work continues.

One discovery from that year away was especially personal. Uptodown had continued to operate smoothly without his daily presence. Hernández acknowledged that he had known the team was talented, but had underestimated how independently it could work. For someone who had helped start the company, that was a useful correction to the importance of being constantly on hand.

He returned for the company's Open Session at Muelle Uno in Málaga with ideas about applying AI to its existing technology, content and community. His emphasis was on assets accumulated through years of work. New tools would have to fit a business that already had users, editorial routines and software to deliver.

Earlier that year, at a Freepik panel in San Francisco, he had described a team of 33 delivering more than 300 million apps a month. He compared Uptodown's constraints with those of an independent game studio. Limited resources and the problem of being discovered were familiar concerns on both sides of the distribution business.

His advice to game developers was to begin with their own website, broaden distribution through independent channels, and use larger stores as part of a wider strategy. It is advice with a founder's preference embedded in it: keep a place you control. A platform can introduce you to customers. Depending entirely on that introduction creates a different relationship.

A computer meets a rather old puzzle

Meanwhile, Hernández was testing AI in a way that would have been familiar to his younger self: through games. In May 2025, he described setting up a system that let vision-capable language models play classic graphic adventures. A script captured the screen, passed information to a model, carried out its suggested actions and repeated the process.

The experiment involved games such as Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. The difficulties were concrete. A model had to know where to click and remember what it was trying to accomplish. Hernández improved the interface with numbered cells and added periodic summaries of rooms, objectives and recent actions. Even an artificial player can benefit from keeping notes.

His account had room for delight and caveats. He observed different levels of progress among models, acknowledged their prior knowledge of famous games, and considered the cost of running a long attempt. An old adventure could make a surprisingly expensive afternoon. The amusement came with an engineer's interest in finding out exactly where the system stumbled.

That is a fitting continuation of Side Project Games. Making and playing small things gives him a direct encounter with tools that can otherwise become subjects for executive presentations. The experiment brings an abstract claim about capability down to a visible question: can this program navigate a room, remember an objective, and do something useful next?

The argument hiding in a word

Hernández's enthusiasm for tools sits alongside a persistent argument about control. In March 2026, he examined the language of “sideloading.” On a desktop computer, he observed, installing software is ordinary. On a phone, installing outside the platform owner's preferred store acquires a special name, and with that name a suggestion of departing from the proper route.

He treats that language as consequential because phones are computers their owners use for serious purposes. His position is that protection should be built around people's ability to choose software. This is his argument about how computing ought to work, rather than a claim that every downloadable file deserves trust.

The trust question has produced work of its own. In December 2025, he announced Uptodown's Transparency Center, publishing information about file checks, developer reviews, moderation and governance. He presented visible operations as a way for users to inspect the store rather than simply accept its assurances.

His public position also includes downloads without mandatory registration and distribution without commissions on developers' revenue. These choices explain the consistency of the project better than a rivalry alone. The small developer and the user with a particular device keep reappearing in his writing. An accessible route matters because their needs may not match a platform's preferred arrangement.

The next customer may never click

In August 2026, Hernández announced Uptodown CLI for Windows and macOS. The command line made it possible to search for, install, update and remove software without visiting a store in a browser. It suited people automating their computers. He also saw a role for AI agents that need to locate and use existing tools.

The proposal gives the old catalogue another potential audience. A person once needed help finding a program; now software acting on a person's behalf might need the same help. Finding the correct version and knowing where a file came from remain recognizable problems. The interface can change while the distribution work underneath it persists.

There is a pleasing circularity here. Uptodown began with desktop software, expanded into mobile, and is now building ways to reach desktop applications through an automated interface. Hernández's attention has moved with the machines. The question about access has stayed close by.

And somewhere alongside that expanding job is the small game studio. It supplies a reminder of why access matters in the first place. Someone wants to make a puzzle, a tavern, a tool. Someone else wants to try it. Hernández has spent more than two decades working on the distance between those two people. He still appears interested in what happens when it gets shorter.

“The app store is becoming infrastructure.”Luis Hernández Garrido, August 2026