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It's very relevant to note that Google Play's terms around in-app billing[1] are far more liberal than Apple's. > Developers offering products within a game do

It's very relevant to note that Google Play's terms around in-app billing[1] are far more liberal than Apple's. > Developers offering products within a game downloaded on Google Play or providing access to game content must use Google Play In-app Billing as the method of payment. Developers offering products within another category of app downloaded on Google Play must use Google Play In-app Billing as the method of payment, except for the following cases: > Payment is solely for physical products > Payment is for digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g. songs that can be played on other music players). That second note is critical here and the example quite literally describes the exact situation here as an exemption. [1]: https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/payments/ https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/payments/

reagank 6y ago
But the second doesn’t apply - you can’t listen to Apple Music with a different app, you have to use their app.
- hellcow 6y ago
  You can listen to it in a browser. You can use an iPad. There are many ways to use Apple Music that do not involve an Android app.
  - mmcclure 6y ago
    This, but to take this even further, MusicKit and the Apple Music APIs even allow for 3rd party Android apps to play back purchased content.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- kick 6y ago
  https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs MusicKit JS lets users play songs from Apple Music and their Cloud Library inside your JavaScript app. When a user provides permission to access their Apple Music account, your JavaScript app can create playlists, add songs to their library, and play any of the millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog directly in a browser, with no ...
jaimehrubiks 6y ago
But it says "on other music players". It doesn't really specify, but I would say that "Spotify" is the music player, and you still need to use it whether it is on the browser or other platform, but it is still "the same music player". I guess that the second case is more related to buying digital content, say an image, music, video, where you get the actual right to use that image, music, video on any platform. But I could be wrong. In any case, as other users mentioned, if Apple music really lets ANY developer create an application that may reproduce the purchased content, then it may look fine.
- beckler 6y ago
  I will say it does seem a bit ambiguous, but I believe their intention is similar with how they view physical products. I believe their intention is that once you download an asset (e.g. song/video/movie), it's a tangible, portable copy that's yours to do freely as you will regardless of device. You wouldn't be able to play music downloaded via Apple Music directly on just any generic music player (like a car stereo or a CD player) due to DRM and other various restrictions, so I don't believe that this would be exempt from that condition.
- chongli 6y ago
  I take "on other music players" to mean other devices. If you have an Apple Music account, you can listen to the music on your MacBook, your iPhone, your iPad, and apparently also your Android phone. All of these devices are functioning as music players when you're playing the music you pay for on Apple Music. The same goes for Netflix. Google does not try to take a cut of Netflix revenue even though you can only watch Netflix shows and movies through the Netflix first party application. You can, however, watch Netflix on many different devices.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
I'm interested in whether allowing Google Play In-app Billing is sufficient to meet the requirements (while also allowing external payment), or if the requirements are supposed to mandate Google Play In-app Billing as the sole possible method of payment. It's not clear from the policy page.
- m-p-3 6y ago
  Some apps were temporarily delisted from the Google Play store because they dared adding a donation button that doesn't go through IAPs. https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-pulls-open-source-android-app-for-having-donation-button https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-pulls-open-source-android-...
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    Other apps offer in-app purchases where you have the choice of in-app or external payment.
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  From the policy, emphasis mine: "MUST use Google Play In-app Billing as THE method of payment." They could be clearer that those words are significant, but in practice this is what the policy is. Which is what you'd expect because the whole point of mandating that form of payments is to take the 30% cut (for digital goods meant to be used primarily on Android devices within apps downloaded from the Android app store).
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > Which is what you'd expect because the whole point of mandating that form of payments is to take the 30% cut (for digital goods meant to be used primarily on Android devices within apps downloaded from the Android app store). That may be a very large portion of the point, but it's not the whole point. For example, if you pay for additional functionality in an app using Google Play In-app Billing, then you can unlock that functionality again on any phone as long as you're signed in to the same Android account. If you paid externally, you can't do that. Note that this directly lowers revenue from the 30% cut of in-app purchases, by removing some people's need to repurchase content they bought in the past but lost access to.
zachruss92 6y ago
First of all, my stance here is that Google is pretty reasonable with their guidelines compared to Apple. My biggest issue in the iOS vs Android debate is that apple is behaving monopolistically and Google isn't. Using the respective app stores give publishers an inherent audience to distribute/sell content through. I don't think it's unreasonable for Apple/Google to try to profit off of the audience they've built. Where I have an issue is that if you don't want to sell on the Play Store, you don't have to. You can install APKs from anywhere and there are even alternative app stores that are completely within Google's ToS. With Apple, you have to sell on the app store or not at all (I know Enterprise apps exist, but it's not the same). I think Apple gets away with this because they're not selling digital content, they're selling a service/subscription. One thing that drives me up a wall about Apple is that you cannot purchase a Kindle book in-app on an iOS device. So if you're in the kindle app and want to buy a book you need to actually go and check out on a web browser (true for both the Amazon app and the Kindle app). On Android, you can do whatever you want. I'm pretty sure that Apple is going to lose this one. We need an open, fair ecosystem for publishing apps.
- ridiculous_fish 6y ago
  Google's stance here looks good on paper, but the reality is very different. Fortnite was the most ambitious attempt to distribute outside of Google Play. Here's what Epic had to say: > After 18 months of operating Fortnite on Android outside of the Google Play Store, we’ve come to a basic realization: Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third-party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store. And Epic gave up and put it on the Play Store.
  - cblades 6y ago
    That all seems very reasonable. Apps downloaded from other sources are much more dangerous than apps downloaded from Google Play.
owenwil 6y ago
Also note that Google allows third-party payment gateways via the Google Play API – Netflix, as an example, dodges the cut with a custom implementation of Stripe! It's a lot more work to implement, but developers actually have the option.

reagank 6y ago

But the second doesn’t apply - you can’t listen to Apple Music with a different app, you have to use their app.

hellcow 6y ago
You can listen to it in a browser. You can use an iPad. There are many ways to use Apple Music that do not involve an Android app.
- mmcclure 6y ago
  This, but to take this even further, MusicKit and the Apple Music APIs even allow for 3rd party Android apps to play back purchased content.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kick 6y ago
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs MusicKit JS lets users play songs from Apple Music and their Cloud Library inside your JavaScript app. When a user provides permission to access their Apple Music account, your JavaScript app can create playlists, add songs to their library, and play any of the millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog directly in a browser, with no ...

jaimehrubiks 6y ago

But it says "on other music players". It doesn't really specify, but I would say that "Spotify" is the music player, and you still need to use it whether it is on the browser or other platform, but it is still "the same music player". I guess that the second case is more related to buying digital content, say an image, music, video, where you get the actual right to use that image, music, video on any platform. But I could be wrong. In any case, as other users mentioned, if Apple music really lets ANY developer create an application that may reproduce the purchased content, then it may look fine.

beckler 6y ago
I will say it does seem a bit ambiguous, but I believe their intention is similar with how they view physical products. I believe their intention is that once you download an asset (e.g. song/video/movie), it's a tangible, portable copy that's yours to do freely as you will regardless of device. You wouldn't be able to play music downloaded via Apple Music directly on just any generic music player (like a car stereo or a CD player) due to DRM and other various restrictions, so I don't believe that this would be exempt from that condition.
chongli 6y ago
I take "on other music players" to mean other devices. If you have an Apple Music account, you can listen to the music on your MacBook, your iPhone, your iPad, and apparently also your Android phone. All of these devices are functioning as music players when you're playing the music you pay for on Apple Music. The same goes for Netflix. Google does not try to take a cut of Netflix revenue even though you can only watch Netflix shows and movies through the Netflix first party application. You can, however, watch Netflix on many different devices.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

I'm interested in whether allowing Google Play In-app Billing is sufficient to meet the requirements (while also allowing external payment), or if the requirements are supposed to mandate Google Play In-app Billing as the sole possible method of payment. It's not clear from the policy page.

m-p-3 6y ago
Some apps were temporarily delisted from the Google Play store because they dared adding a donation button that doesn't go through IAPs. https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-pulls-open-source-android-app-for-having-donation-button https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-pulls-open-source-android-...
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  Other apps offer in-app purchases where you have the choice of in-app or external payment.
adrianmonk 6y ago
From the policy, emphasis mine: "MUST use Google Play In-app Billing as THE method of payment." They could be clearer that those words are significant, but in practice this is what the policy is. Which is what you'd expect because the whole point of mandating that form of payments is to take the 30% cut (for digital goods meant to be used primarily on Android devices within apps downloaded from the Android app store).
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > Which is what you'd expect because the whole point of mandating that form of payments is to take the 30% cut (for digital goods meant to be used primarily on Android devices within apps downloaded from the Android app store). That may be a very large portion of the point, but it's not the whole point. For example, if you pay for additional functionality in an app using Google Play In-app Billing, then you can unlock that functionality again on any phone as long as you're signed in to the same Android account. If you paid externally, you can't do that. Note that this directly lowers revenue from the 30% cut of in-app purchases, by removing some people's need to repurchase content they bought in the past but lost access to.

zachruss92 6y ago

First of all, my stance here is that Google is pretty reasonable with their guidelines compared to Apple. My biggest issue in the iOS vs Android debate is that apple is behaving monopolistically and Google isn't. Using the respective app stores give publishers an inherent audience to distribute/sell content through. I don't think it's unreasonable for Apple/Google to try to profit off of the audience they've built. Where I have an issue is that if you don't want to sell on the Play Store, you don't have to. You can install APKs from anywhere and there are even alternative app stores that are completely within Google's ToS. With Apple, you have to sell on the app store or not at all (I know Enterprise apps exist, but it's not the same). I think Apple gets away with this because they're not selling digital content, they're selling a service/subscription. One thing that drives me up a wall about Apple is that you cannot purchase a Kindle book in-app on an iOS device. So if you're in the kindle app and want to buy a book you need to actually go and check out on a web browser (true for both the Amazon app and the Kindle app). On Android, you can do whatever you want. I'm pretty sure that Apple is going to lose this one. We need an open, fair ecosystem for publishing apps.

ridiculous_fish 6y ago
Google's stance here looks good on paper, but the reality is very different. Fortnite was the most ambitious attempt to distribute outside of Google Play. Here's what Epic had to say: > After 18 months of operating Fortnite on Android outside of the Google Play Store, we’ve come to a basic realization: Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third-party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store. And Epic gave up and put it on the Play Store.
- cblades 6y ago
  That all seems very reasonable. Apps downloaded from other sources are much more dangerous than apps downloaded from Google Play.

owenwil 6y ago

Also note that Google allows third-party payment gateways via the Google Play API – Netflix, as an example, dodges the cut with a custom implementation of Stripe! It's a lot more work to implement, but developers actually have the option.