Bitwarden is still releasing free builds but yeah you'd need a new project with a new name to use it from the Play Store or App Store.
Turns out Keyguard, an alternative Bitwarden client is already on the Play Store.
https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app
Edit: turns out Keyguard is source available but fully copyrighted.
So if we now have Vaultwarden + keyguard can these things move away from Bitwardens api and pursue their own?
Is there any reason to? It's kinda nice that they all stick to the same contract. I don't really like the Bitwarden desktop app, but because there's so much code out there, it was pretty easy to have an LLM write a detailed spec for a client and then implement something that works for me.
The Bitwarden web client has actively broken Vaultwarden compatibility at least once <https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/issues/7607>. It’s reasonable to expect they’ll do so more, carelessly or deliberately. They already have features and UI that don’t make sense for Vaultwarden, and the rate of such things feels to me (as a mere user) to have increased. When Bitwarden continues in the direction they’re going, I think a hard fork of the entire ecosystem for Vaultwarden is fairly likely, and it will almost certainly be a good thing, and in hindsight we’ll probably wish the fork branched off earlier.