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Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

developer.chrome.com

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Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#41

Post by nitrogen »

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…

Continuing the speculation, I'm curious whether that uptake is low in relative or in absolute terms. A small percentage of Google scale is still a big enough business to make a lot of people rich and a lot more comfortably employed.

In a hypothetical world where Google and Alphabet are broken up into a bunch of small companies, would the Extension Store Company be making enough revenue to be viable?

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#43

Post by nitrogen »

duskwuff wrote: post #31
Analemma_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is destroying competition though. What Google does is enter a market which previously had a healthy economy of paid software, snuff out all the other players with a free version, and then abandon the space when they get bored. And the old economy can never come back, because there's hysteresis involved in the relative costs of starting from scratch versus keeping a functioning ecosystem alive, and because users…

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.

Whatever you would use a browser extension to do now, there was probably a standalone application to do the same thing before.

The original vision of the web didn't just have "sites with servers" and "consumers with browsers", but rather tons of potential independent "User-Agents" that would perform tasks on behalf of people. The consolidation of the web into just browsers, and subsequent flipflopping between creation and destruction (similar to the EEE cycle MS has employed), has killed whatever of that vision might have flourished.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#44

Post by YetAnotherNick »

codazoda wrote: post #40
single_source wrote: post #8

Just my luck... I created my extension and started monetizing it March of this year...

See the other thread where a Google employee offers to make it right.

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.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#47

Post by neximo64 »

_qulr wrote: post #21
neximo64 wrote: post #20

Google is so protective about Chrome and Search they're scared about getting drawn into an Apple like Epic problem with antitrust consequences.

They're already drawn in. Epic sued Google too. But Epic doesn't have a Chrome extension, and Google Play Store payments aren't similarly deprecated.

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.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#48

Post by zmmmmm »

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,…

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 even if not exciting to the HN crowd (revenue/expense neutral, but serving a useful place in the world ...).

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#49

Post by divbzero »

gnicholas wrote: post #5

This is super annoying. I have two extensions, one which we've offered on Chrome and Firefox for years, and which uses Stripe for payments. The other we only offered on Chrome and was paid through the Chrome Store. Thinking of all the work we'll have to do to manage accounts/payments/etc on the PDF extension almost makes me want to scrap the whole thing. Most frustrating is the migration. We have been live in the Chr…

That really sucks. I’m guessing Google aggregates payments so there’s no way of getting individual subscription data?

If you explain the predicament clearly, succinctly, and with as easy a resolution as possible, I think a lot of your customers will understand the situation and appreciate that you’re doing your best for them.

Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

#50

Post by exikyut »

This part is mildly technically amusing (to me, at least):

> Exporting user licenses

> - Migrate to another payments processor

> - Migrate your licensing tracking

> ...

> ... You’ll need to use OAuth 2.0 with your users' consent ... . The general sequence is:

> 1. Implement your replacement payment/licensing scheme.

> 2. ...

When I got to (1) I couldn't help but feel like whoever's tasked with dealing with this is going to feel like they've just been asked to go from zero to "now draw the rest of the owl" without even a line sketch to springboard off of.

The bullet points before that are kind of similar as well.

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