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Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

developer.chrome.com

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Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#101

Post by jfrunyon »

_qulr wrote: post #53
neximo64 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google isn't really like Apple in the monopolistic sense. You're free to install your own app store on a Gphone. Chrome extensions are a bit different because they have to be signed with another store by Google anyway.

Technically, you can sideload Chrome extensions with Developer mode, so I don't think that's much different from Android.

The difference is that on Android you can get a different store, and the only thing you have to do is turn on dev mode and then download/run the apk.

There seems to be a lot more friction to sideloading a Chrome extension: download, unzip, turn on dev mode, click a button & navigate to the unzipped files...

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#103

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

ufmace wrote: post #89
duskwuff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "healthy economy of paid software" previously existed here? The only other site for browser extensions I'm aware of which predated the Chrome Web Store was addons.mozilla.org, and that never supported paid extensions at all.

I think for a while, Google sort of hoped to turn Chrome extensions into something like actual apps. They seemed to support stuff like making desktop icons for them, opening them in windows that seemed to be independent from Chrome, making them the only way to make something that seemed like a real app on Chromebooks, etc. With all of that in place, it seems to make sense to let people pay charge/pay for them. Then I…

Google apps (for Chrome?) were somewhat separate but under one store, they just got Android apps working on chromebooks, deprecated it and now this. It's just a push towards Android ecosystem where they make more money.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#104

Post by rswail »

"There is no way to bulk export your existing user licenses, so you need to have your users help with this part of the migration."

I don't mind that Google has decided to stop running a payment/subscription/licensing service for web extensions. Even though it's basically just an API to their services that run the Android Play Store (or should be).

But to not provide a way to export the information is pathetic.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#105

Post by rswail »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #27
stickfigure wrote: post #26

The interesting thing here is that a commercial marketplace for browser extensions failed. That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?! Is it just that nobody paid for things? Presumably they're going to keep running the chrome web store, so isn't a cut of paymens "free money" to them? Is there some big cost to this I'm not seeing,…

My personal sense (not knowing anything internal about the product) is that uptake is extremely low. It also isn't free to run a product that accepts payment. You have to hook it in to a payment processor, handle fraud, handle a different expectation of support, have a bunch of custom code to handle the paid vs. unpaid case. At Google's scale, there's liability to consider, and various compliance and moderation issue…

As a counter to this "it's not worth it because of overhead", Google already runs all of this payment/licensing infrastructure to support the Android Play Store, GSuite, GCP etc.

The overhead for the Chrome extension store would be similar but much lower volume than the Android Play store, given that the attack surface (and thus APIs to monitor) are sandboxed by the browser, and the number of extensions is at least an order of magnitude lower than the number of Android apps.

So at "Google scale" this is a rounding error in their payment/licensing space.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#106

Post by zaarn »

xyse53 wrote: post #67
molticrystal wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do a chargeback through the card/bank, they'll have a webform for you to submit it somewhere for contested charges. They'll ask for proof, just put you paid for a service that will no longer exist and include screenshots of the deprecation page.

Has anyone tried this with Google though? Is there a chance it can result in a locked account? And what would recovery be like?

Yes. Your account is banned. Beg for forgiveness.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#107

Post by single_source »

mumblerino wrote: post #99
single_source wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, I've made my money back so I'm not as concerned about the $25, but there goes any chance of growing the revenue in any meaningful way. I am getting a kick out of all the people here saying that "no one pays for extensions". I've consistently made $50-100 from mine with no marketing whatsoever.

$100 total? Doesn’t sound like a lot unless you worked on it for a day.

Sorry, no monthly.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#108

Post by gnicholas »

exikyut wrote: post #88
gnicholas wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it looks like there is a way to do this. But this requires them to authenticate to allow it, and is a hassle on both ends. Seriously, what a huge pain for all involved. It is shocking they are giving such a short timeline for this transition, especially during COVID (they use COVID as an excuse for slow processing times, but clearly they don't care that devs would be similarly affected).

Maybe provide some options: - Default to an automatic resubscription for (say) 50-75% of the current list price - Consent to OAuth2 Google ("one-time blahblahblah"), and retrieve perpetual payment info that way - Accept Store receipts (capturing all email headers and keeping all PDFs for cross-comparison... meh) I wonder if you should send 2 warning emails or 3. ("action required" "your account will automatically be…

Yeah, if we could email our customers that would be great. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to access the email addresses for our customers. Maybe I'm really dumb, but all I can find are anonymized transaction IDs.

It would be a lot better if they would allow us to contact our users via email. Instead, we're going to have to use pop-up messages that annoy users and are likely to be reflexively closed by many of them.

I'd love to know what they are communicating to users, and when. At least then we could wait to communicate with them until just after they send an email, so that users would be less likely to ignore our messages. As is, it feels like we're flying blind.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#109

Post by seanwilson »

I think people are missing that you can still charge for extension, just not with Google's payment system. Anyway, called this well over a year ago - whenever anyone asked for tips on how to integrate Chrome payments into their extension I would strongly recommend against it.

If you read the Chrome extension developers forums, you would have seen frequent posts about the payment system breaking, plus it was lacking lots of features like discount codes, letting you change subscription prices, being able to share purchases with Firefox (I wouldn't expect this from Google but it's a big negative) and letting you export user emails. It was clear Google wasn't interested in supporting the payments feature for a while. They've let it sit broken since the COVID lockdowns started which is completely insane (with unfortunate developers in the forums asking when it'll be fixed so they can integrate payments as if they think it's a one-off).

For what it's worth, I use Paddle + Firebase for a website SEO auditor extension I run (https://www.checkbot.io/) and it works well, where Paddle addresses all of the downsides above.

If anyone wants any tips on setting up something similar, feel free to message me. I know a lot of people recommend Stripe, but Paddle takes care of country specific tax and VAT for you which is a big plus for reduced admin.

My extension was originally meant to be a Chrome App but they deprecated those before I launched haha.

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