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Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

developer.chrome.com

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Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#161

Post by skinnymuch »

atum47 wrote: post #56
atum47 wrote: post #42

Yep. I remember paying for the license to publish a joke extension I've made for chrome. Now I won't be able to make my money back, haha. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crosstext/gnlobfhf...

fun fact: this won't work on facebook anymore. I made this so I can write bad jokes on my Facebook, after the third one, facebook wrote a script that undo what my script does. So I wrote a patch to disable facebook script first. The Facebook wrote another script that undo what my script does, again. Then I just gave up. I was a super poor student back then, no point in engaging in such nonsense. I probably have the v…

I might be misunderstanding. Why would FB do anything about something you or any other single person is doing?

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#162

Post by skinnymuch »

single_source wrote: post #78
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate that he had sympathy, but I think max he can do is refund $25. I think that that amount is the least of concern to the most developers.

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.

That relative small amount is cool for your efforts, but is just one example

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#163

Post by r14n »

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,…

The marketplace did not fail. The Chrome Web Store lives on - it's just the PAYMENT section of it that fails. All the extensions will still exist and be available for download, we devs just can't use Google's payment or subscription service anymore.

So if a dev has thousands subscribers paying monthly through Google's system, they will all have to sign up again with a new payment processor - there is no way to migrate the payment info, only the license info.

And yes Google takes a cut each month so it's hard to imagine why they have decided to forgo these millions of dollars and at the same time hurt extension devs - because I can imagine a very large number of people deciding not to resubscribe :(

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#165

Post by jfoster »

skinnymuch wrote: post #156
jfoster wrote: post #148

From the email: "When we launched the Chrome Web Store 11 years ago, there weren't a lot of ways for our developers to take payment from users. Today, there is a thriving ecosystem of payment providers offering a far more diverse set of features than a single provider could hope to. Now that our developers have so many great options to choose from, we can comfortably sunset our own payments integration." My takeaway:…

Why did you quote comfortably sunset? Are you indicating that this is anything but that? It isn’t clear.

I'm not personally impacted by this one, but I've been impacted by a very similar deprecation (Google Wallet for Digital Goods) by Google. Can assure you that anyone impacted by this deprecation isn't feeling comfortable about it.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#166

Post by jfoster »

animationwill wrote: post #151
jfoster wrote: post #148

From the email: "When we launched the Chrome Web Store 11 years ago, there weren't a lot of ways for our developers to take payment from users. Today, there is a thriving ecosystem of payment providers offering a far more diverse set of features than a single provider could hope to. Now that our developers have so many great options to choose from, we can comfortably sunset our own payments integration." My takeaway:…

>> As options increase, expect Google to "comfortably sunset" their solutions. Read some of the other comments here. This is anything other than “comfortably” and will create a lot of pain & churn for Both the devs and users

Exactly my point. Those are, however, the words Google used in the email they sent out about this.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#167

Post by atum47 »

skinnymuch wrote: post #161
atum47 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fun fact: this won't work on facebook anymore. I made this so I can write bad jokes on my Facebook, after the third one, facebook wrote a script that undo what my script does. So I wrote a patch to disable facebook script first. The Facebook wrote another script that undo what my script does, again. Then I just gave up. I was a super poor student back then, no point in engaging in such nonsense. I probably have the v…

I might be misunderstanding. Why would FB do anything about something you or any other single person is doing?

Well, you tell me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsKz1py7co

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#168

Post by londons_explore »

londons_explore wrote: post #129
zmmmmm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno ... Google shuts things down independent of revenue metrics as far as I can tell. They seem to set a bar somewhere around "is this the next Gmail" and if the answer is no they shut it down regardless of how profitable it may be. They want a few giant businesses, not a hundred small ones. I wish they would look at spinning these things out because many of them would make entirely viable independent entities ev…

It's basically impossible to spin something that has user data out of Google. To my knowledge, it's never happened. It's because the user data is all protected under googles privacy policies, and you wouldn't be able to migrate that data to a third party without user consent. The process of asking for consent would harm Google's reputation more than the value of the spun out business. The PR damage is less by just sh…

Oh, and the actual code of any service is deeply integrated into googles infrastructure. You'd need to do a near full rewrite of many services even to run them in GCP.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#169

Post by moron4hire »

runawaybottle wrote: post #24
moron4hire wrote: post #6

I feel like we are getting nearly weekly examples of "the platform store will eventually kill your business". These platform stores wouldn't be anywhere without independent developers building the software to sell in then, and these big companies just shit on them.

It’s so weird when you think about it. Does Valve and Steam sit there and wait for a successful game, copy it, stamp out competition, see if it works and decide to continue or not? Google represents one type of software thankfully, web. It’s craziness at the end of the day. Examining this behavior takes you into the pathological where no other being exists, Thanos incarnate.

https://voicesofvr.com/937-facebooks-desire-to-own-the-metav...

https://voicesofvr.com/944-guy-godin-on-getting-cloned-by-fa...

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#170

Post by jfrunyon »

michaelt wrote: post #144
jfrunyon wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly... I don't know if that's intentional; Drive 'files' get really laggy really quick in Chrome too.

There are a lot of claims [1] that Google makes a ~suspicious number of accidental mistakes~ that harm performance on competing browsers. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

I'm aware. However, Hanlon's razor suggests it's not intentional. Moreover, I think Occam's razor suggests the same: it's a lot simpler if we assume they just primarily test in their own browser (just like I'm sure Mozilla primarily uses Firefox) and just don't care enough to fix any performance deficiencies they do identify based on browser market share / amount they think users will care.

(Keep in mind: I'm not saying Google is doing the right thing and trying to ensure an equal experience across browsers; I'm just saying I don't think they're intentionally trying to make their pages break other browsers)

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