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Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

android-developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

#101

Post by himujjal »

deergomoo wrote: post #75
athirnuaimi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe has real costs because it has to interact with the visa and MasterCard networks. The app stores basically have zero incremental costs. They just let you download a file from a directory of listings

They host the files and pay for the traffic, that's not insignificant at the scale of Google and Apple, even considering their enormous size. There was a story a couple of years back about how Apple's AWS bill was $30 million/month, I'd bet a large chunk of that is the App Store.

only 30 million? considering how much apple makes in profits from their app store thats a lot less

Re: Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

#102

Post by aembleton »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #11

Worth remembering that as good as it is that Google is reducing it's abusive taxation on third party developers, the primary reason they're doing this is to try to quiet the majority of developers asking for stronger government regulations against this taxation without actually reducing their profit much, since the large companies which bring in the majority of revenue still have to pay full price. Basically, they're…

> they're hoping that this will stop some app developers from demanding the right to use third party payment processors

I thought you could do that for apps through the Play store. For example I pay for the Windy app through Paypal.

Re: Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

#103

Post by londons_explore »

guytv wrote: post #99
londons_explore wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is an opensource implementation of those support services (microg) which work for most apps.

oh, nice. I didn't know about it. It is a huge undertaking, google has services from "simple" things like location, to complex things like face recognition.

I believe many of the microg services are mocked out in a way that makes apps 'work', but complex things like step counting in Google fit or face recognition will always return some bogus results.

Still, it makes 99% of apps work.

Re: Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

#104

Post by madeofpalk »

aembleton wrote: post #102
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #11

Worth remembering that as good as it is that Google is reducing it's abusive taxation on third party developers, the primary reason they're doing this is to try to quiet the majority of developers asking for stronger government regulations against this taxation without actually reducing their profit much, since the large companies which bring in the majority of revenue still have to pay full price. Basically, they're…

> they're hoping that this will stop some app developers from demanding the right to use third party payment processors I thought you could do that for apps through the Play store. For example I pay for the Windy app through Paypal.

I believe Games is the one exception - Games must use the Play Store for all in-app purchases.

Re: Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

#105

Post by londons_explore »

enos_feedler wrote: post #73
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #11

Worth remembering that as good as it is that Google is reducing it's abusive taxation on third party developers, the primary reason they're doing this is to try to quiet the majority of developers asking for stronger government regulations against this taxation without actually reducing their profit much, since the large companies which bring in the majority of revenue still have to pay full price. Basically, they're…

The primary reason they are doing it is because Apple did it. Same goes for every other rev share change that Apple has implemented.

Which is odd... Users of the Play store and App store are a disjoint set. Very few users will switch from Android to iOS or back because in-app purchases are cheaper. Developers are generally forced to support both stores.

There wouldn't seem to be any strong reason for both stores to pick identical fee structures - they aren't really in competition.

Re: Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

#106

Post by shimfish »

What's also not being said here is that ~99% of apps on Google Play don't make money this way either.

Due to a combination of Android user's reluctance to spend money on apps at all and the rampant piracy that Android's open model makes trivially easy, most developers only way to make money is through in-app advertising, which this change obviously makes no difference to.

Google Play is mostly a pyramid scheme. Developer's can only make money from showing ads and at the same time can only get downloads if they place ads on other people's apps. And Google just happens to own all the mobile ad companies.

This 15% cut ends up "costing" Google virtually nothing.

And as for Google "helping developers build sustainable businesses", the only times they've ever reached out to me were to offer me the opportunity to have someone help me spend thousands of dollars a month on mobile ads. Never, for example, to actually take down all the scam apps that use my app's name, icon and screenshots.

Re: Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

#107

Post by Waterluvian »

danybittel wrote: post #41

It puzzles me that some people still think 30% is a reasonable cut for any kind of online store. Imagine you're 3 guys / girls and working on an app / game / .. whatever and one person only does "distribution" of the final asset. You are working one / two years or more on it, and one person only checks / verifies the final asset and organizes hosting. How is this in any way justified? And the days that person made an…

A reasonable amount is literally any amount the market will tolerate. Seems 30% nolonger cuts it in any of these stores.

Re: Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

#108

Post by salicideblock »

londons_explore wrote: post #105
enos_feedler wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary reason they are doing it is because Apple did it. Same goes for every other rev share change that Apple has implemented.

Which is odd... Users of the Play store and App store are a disjoint set. Very few users will switch from Android to iOS or back because in-app purchases are cheaper. Developers are generally forced to support both stores. There wouldn't seem to be any strong reason for both stores to pick identical fee structures - they aren't really in competition.

The discourse is that Play store and App store are monopolies (arguably duopolies) facing the developers, not the users.

I expect that developers for the Play store and App store are two sets with a big overlap

Re: Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

#109

Post by lordnacho »

londons_explore wrote: post #105
enos_feedler wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary reason they are doing it is because Apple did it. Same goes for every other rev share change that Apple has implemented.

Which is odd... Users of the Play store and App store are a disjoint set. Very few users will switch from Android to iOS or back because in-app purchases are cheaper. Developers are generally forced to support both stores. There wouldn't seem to be any strong reason for both stores to pick identical fee structures - they aren't really in competition.

Users might not change phones but android users might have different behaviour to ios users in terms of how likely they are to spend. Which perhaps skews the developers towards starting on one platform or the other.

But generally yes I agree that it can't be all that big a difference.

Re: Google Play service fee reduced to 15% for the first $1M/year

#110

Post by lenkite »

input_sh wrote: post #81
krisgenre wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was really the outcome of Microsoft losing the anti-trust case? Windows still comes with a preinstalled browser and I don't remember ever seeing a version of Windows without one.

They've reached a settlement equal to a slap on the wrist. They've agreed to share their API with third parties and a couple of people to verify that for a couple of years (it expired in 2007). So basically nothing.

"So basically nothing"

Umm..no.

IE could now be un-installed on Windows.

After various settlement fines in the US with several parties, the EU took it further and also leveraged its largest anti-trust penalty of that era. (~1 billion)

Microsoft were forced to share ALL their earlier private computing API's as open specs. MS word, excel formats, SMB, etc. This was amazing and resulting in several OSS libraries.

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