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

Post by blihp » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

krisgenre wrote: post #67

onion2k wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those apps would not survive without vendor-included single click app stores anyway. I find this a little amusing because it's the exact reason why Microsoft lost their IE anti-trust case. Users were given IE by default, and because using something else required effort IE took a huge chunk of the market remarkably quickly. That was deemed to be violating their effective monopoly position on OSs to influence their pos…

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.

Post by ocdtrekkie » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

einpoklum wrote: post #151

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying off politicians has worked well for Google since the Obama era, but it's not working anymore. Reason why was Trump's election. Politicians realized that Google's services, and how they're moderated, can do a lot more to affect an election than a donation ever could.

You have a point there... but even so - Google has been censoring non-mainstream political views, and artificially promoting mainstream news media (the big networks anyway). Isn't that enough to curry favor?

Post by giantg2 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #156

shimfish wrote: post #106

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. Devel…

I've always wondered what it is about Android that makes users reluctant to pay for apps. I'm guilty of it too. I have both iOS and Android devices and I spend far more money buying apps on my iOS device.

Post by oblio » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #167

oblio wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually getting better. New versions of Android are getting adopted faster: https://www.gsmarena.com/report_android_11_has_the_fastest_a... It's not yet at iOS levels, but Google is actually getting there, I'm impressed. It's much easier to pull this off when you're a huge company making the hardware and the software and you can just boss OEMs and telecom companies around, it's much harder when you have a Micro…

IF one happens to own a flagship Android device from top brands, nothing changed for the devices that most people actually buy in large quantities for their pre-paid cards. https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/4/20847758/google-android-up... Google's own security reports marketing usually only focus on the devices where they can sell a nice Treble picture.

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 1:34 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #152

eru wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't more competition be the logical thing to ask for instead?

More competition how? MS-DOS cornered the desktop market around 1981. It remained the dominant desktop OS, despite being an utter piece of crap OS and technologically obsolete even at the moment it was introduced, until around 1990, when it was overtaken by products from the same company, Windows 3.1 and later Windows 95. Windows 95 then took over in... 1995 :-) Windows is still the dominant desktop platform in 2021,…