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

501 points by h43k3r 6y ago

nickmancol 6y ago
Wow! Finally Google play store has reached the economies of scale, I'm wondering when will Apple do? /sarcasm
matsemann 6y ago
> To aid their quest for growth we provide a broad range of support, (...) Funny that it then goes on to list lots of stuff where no human support is actually involved. The support developers want is to get a person to talk to when Google's algorithms ban their app or account for no reason and wrecks their business.
- shimfish 6y ago
  I've been trying for ages to get Google to take down spam/scam apps that use my apps name and screenshots but just add "tips" or "guide" to pretend they're legit. Nothing doing. Still about 50 imitation apps that come up in their search when looking for my app.
unsungNovelty 6y ago
This is also just catching up with Apple by the way - https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-store-small-business-program/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s.... Very similar. While I have had reservations on people marching for third party stores in iOS, maybe it is not a bad idea. But what if Epic, FB and Google just create a new app store with their privacy invasive ways? This bugs me. Sure it is hard but a coalition can make it possible right? Either way, we need to ask for better terms for sure.
- hu3 6y ago
  Sure, if by catching up to Apple you mean also throwing a bone to reduce anti-thrust pressure [1] and help their case against Epic and Spotify [2]. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/18/app-store-commission-cut-antitrust-complaints-and-investigations-continue/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/18/app-store-commission-cut-anti... [2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/13/spotify-supports-epic-games-private-antitrust-action-against-apple https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/13/spotify-supports-...
chiaki123 6y ago
Very good! Love Google
chiaki123 6y ago
Check out Apple's margins for their services unit. Not sure of if Google publishes this data, but they may.
Crazyontap 6y ago
I sometimes wonder if Apple didn't come up with this model of charging devs 30% even Google wouldn't have too. These companies often end up with similar policies. But that one greedy kid showed everyone how easy it is to leech off on hard work of devs (who are also to be blame as we happily agreed to this BS) and now it's a common practice. If safari browser had a Safari store with 30% cut pretty sure chrome extension store would also be charging 30% instead of their 5% now.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  30% is pretty common, just look at Steam. You can download and install games on you Windows machine straight from any website. Yet Steam was able to take a 30% cut and be very successful. The fact remains that developers are very happy to give 30% when their sales increase with a few factors.
  - dbrgn 6y ago
    That argument may be valid for Steam. But Google Play is a de-facto monopoly and the Apple App Store is a full (and enforced) monopoly. They can charge 30% because there is no viable alternative for the developers.
  - curryst 6y ago
    Steam also offers a more substantial service. They have fairly significant social services from chat to profiles to the ability to join a friend's game right from Steam. The downloads are also usually substantially larger (although the average price is also significantly higher). The same is true of most of the desktop game stores. I don't know what the real pricing should be, but I can't see how the pricing for something like Google's games would match up against Steam. They don't have feature parity, and some of the features they have are way less useful on mobile. E.g. I wouldn't use their chat even if it existed; my phone already has 4 or 5 messengers.
ecmascript 6y ago
While this is good, 15% is still a crazy unreasonable amount that makes me completely unwilling to create an app for these shitty companies. I urge everyone to simply just develop web apps and it will be competitive enough.
rvnx 6y ago
This is a very good change
agloeregrets 6y ago
This is compared to Apple's program where you have to make less than $1M to qualify the next/current year for 15%. Makes much more sense.
addicted 6y ago
I'm glad Google didn't choose the unnecessarily convoluted and worse solution Apple did that only adds more bureaucracy.
- psaux 6y ago
  “ The App Store's standard commission rate of 30 percent remains in place for apps selling digital goods and services and making more than $1 million in proceeds, defined as a developer's post-commission earnings” [1] What is convoluted and worse? I am not a mobile Dev at this time, just going by what I see online. Edit: [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-store-small-business-program/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...
  - CGamesPlay 6y ago
    If you make $999k in revenue, you will receive almost $850k in profit. If you make $1000k in revenue, you will instead receive $700k in profit. You're strangely incentivized to completely shut down your app as you approach the 1000k mark, unless you're confident you'll make it past the 1200k mark, where it's worth it again. Silly system.
    - rabuse 6y ago
      That does seem terrible. It should be bracketed how our taxes are, honestly.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - psaux 6y ago
      Thank you, great information. Those incentives then have to change. I wrote a few apps back in the day, and 30% seemed high, but I never hit over $100k in rev. I was hoping the little guy who scaled would have won here.
    - shimfish 6y ago
Scoundreller 6y ago
When 0% first $1m? How much of a hit are they taking from 15%?
- hanniabu 6y ago
  They already have 0% for the first $0, don't be greedy. /s
  - SilverRed 6y ago
    Well there was a $15 sign up fee last I checked (although last I checked was close to 10 years ago).
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Google isn't going to pay your card processing fees for you, and there is a nonzero cost to hosting and moderating the absolutely enormous number of apps that get nearly 0 revenue.
  - SilverRed 6y ago
    I think 30% is actually perfectly fine for what they offer. Unlike on iOS, google gives you the option to opt out and distribute your own app with your own payments. 30% seems like a reasonable fee but the problem is when you are forced to pay it. As a small dev I'm happy to pay 30% for what is a great value. A company like netflix probably doesn't see as much value when the cost of doing their own payment processing becomes cheaper.
hanniabu 6y ago
I feel like they're feeling the pressure for a potential incumbent to come in and disrupt the market they've cornered. Who's in the best position to take a run on this? Or do you think it'd more likely to come from a new player?
- colechristensen 6y ago
  I feel like they are fearing antitrust actions in Europe and the US - and getting broken apart so pieces of themselves will be competing with other pieces.
- lovedswain 6y ago
  They're only thing they're feeling is the pressure of multiple regulators analysing the fine print
perryizgr8 6y ago
Shouldn't this be inverted? Small devs with unknown apps have more to gain from play store's distribution, and won't mind paying 30% of a smaller revenue in exchange for all the help. Bigger apps like Netflix are already doing their own advertising and marketing and have close to zero to gain from play store. And they will be making a large amount of revenue. According to this they will have to pay 30% of a larger amount. It feels backwards.
- howinteresting 6y ago
  As an exertion of raw power, yes, it would be inverted. But we live in a world where maximal exertion of raw power is looked down upon.
  - perryizgr8 6y ago
    Don't most products and services offer a volume discount? Or something equivalent? I don't understand why the equation is reversed in this case. Does google not offer volume discounts to their big GCP customers? Is that also "looked down upon"?
    - howinteresting 6y ago
      Often there's an inverted U shaped curve, where startups and very large customers get discounts but medium-size customers don't.
- adanto6840 6y ago
  Valve [Steam] does this "inverted" model, as of ~ December 2018... It wasn't overly well-received on the PR front -- though I do suspect that it earned them a decent bit of AAA title/publisher credit, heh. Realistically, that's probably where much of the money is at; if anything, props to them for getting away with it.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    They had to do this because instead of regulatory pressure, they were feeling the opposite: Competitive options in the PC market. With Steam's high cut, any publisher large enough to make their own launcher should would be incredibly stupid not to do so, which is why Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Epic, etc. all have their own launchers now. And some of them have, or could, start selling third party titles as well. Valve is presumably hoping giving these large publishers a deal will cause them to reevaluate the effort in developing and maintaining their own storefronts. ...In otherwords, it's also an anticompetitive play, it's just the one that makes sense in Valve's particular monopoly space.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
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 hoping that this will stop some app developers from demanding the right to use third party payment processors, which would likely be used many of the larger >$1 million revenue publishers. The Android Police article about this cites an example from iOS, that "On Apple's App Store, the 98% of developers who qualified for a lower revenue share rate were responsible for less than 5% of Apple's total collected revenue"
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  The primary reason they are doing it is because Apple did it. Same goes for every other rev share change that Apple has implemented.
  - DeusExMachina 6y ago
    That still poses the question: why did Apple do it? I believe the reasons are the ones explained by the parent comment. Also, I don't think Google mindlessly copies anything Apple does. Sure, part of it is pure competition. But I'm sure they also evaluated the reasons behind Apple's decision.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      Note that this is 4 months later. That's about as quick as things like this can be done in a big organisation like Google where the decision has to go via policy, legal, engineering, translation, etc.
    - enos_feedler 6y ago
      I believe that Google's goal is to show regulators that Apple has market power. The easiest way to demonstrate that is to follow what they do and make it look like they are in control. The reason I believe this is that it is uncharacteristic of Google to blatantly copy something like this over the years, yet it is clear they are fast following all of Apple's decisions around the app store. I would expect Google to try and differentiate and come out with a new, competitive way to make the developer ecosystem happy.
danShumway 6y ago
Further evidence that developer pressure and legal pressure on smartphone platforms work, that they aren't a waste of time. Prolonged campaigns for better terms can make a tangible difference, and we should be encouraged by this result to advocate for even better terms. It turns out that when they have real pressure, it is possible for Google and Apple to come up with better terms. Keep in mind that the reason Google is being sued for antitrust isn't because it was taking 30% -- it's because it forced manufactures not to install or bundle any 3rd party stores by threatening to remove access to the Play store if any competing storefronts were enabled by default on consumer devices. So this doesn't change the original complaint, but it's still a very big win for smaller developers.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  > Further evidence that developer pressure and legal pressure on smartphone platforms work, that they aren't a waste of time. Sure, if you're Epic. For the rest of us minnows, we just have to play the hand we're dealt.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    This change directly impacts minnows, it's a revenue cut for companies making less than a million dollars, not more. And if your point is that it took a company as large as Epic raising a fuss to get that change, well... why should I care? It's still a change that will help smaller developers. Honestly, I don't get HN's position on this. When Epic sued, people complained that Epic was too big and progress would only be made if an ideologically pure company pushed for it. When conversation started talking about regulation, I heard people complain that it wasn't going to go anywhere and that regulators didn't care. Then when other companies like Hey and Microsoft started joining in making statements against current app store terms, people complained there weren't going to be any changes, that this was just a farce that would result in at best a backroom deal with Epic and/or Microsoft that wouldn't affect smaller devs. Now there's a tangible policy change that will have a huge impact on smaller devs, and the complaint is that the wrong company had a role in it? What do you want?
    - 6y ago
onetimemanytime 6y ago
Honestly those making tens of millions deserve this even more from an economical perspective. There is cost of running the store but once you gross, say $100M, paying $30M to Google is kinda harsh.
oh_sigh 6y ago
Wow, it sure is a coincidence that its being cut to basically the same rate (though a different structuring) as Apple. First google independently came up with the 30% rate just like Apple did, and then they independently came up with 15% for the first $1M like Apple did.
- jahmed 6y ago
  I get the sarcasm but really its a duopoly game like a Stackleberg. The best move is to match and not try to undercut.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    This kind of price matching is the perfect definition of a duopoly.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Right. But you would never even know that another company existed reading their PR piece about how they're doing it for the developers.
- danShumway 6y ago
  It is amazing how quickly "industry standard" prices can change after just one company deviates from them. It's almost like the standard wasn't ever set in stone or based on careful cost-benefit analysis to begin with.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Sounds more like a price-fixing cartel, and they are only acting now because they're afraid of anti-trust litigation.
- croes 6y ago
  It has nothing to do with the antitrust lawsuits.
jmsflknr 6y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26477802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26477802
- pvg 6y ago
  It's not an HN dupe if there hasn't been any discussion
tener 6y ago
I think it is also likely that >1M$ developers can start negotiating custom agreements. Hard to say how much exactly is their negotiating power in that case, but it is probably non-zero.
danybittel 6y ago
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 any marketing / visibility are long gone. I think more "fair" is something like 5%, more in the line of what a payment processor does. Which probably, at this point does more than.
- loosetypes 6y ago
  Masters of Doom described a similar sentiment circa ‘93 only now “tech” are the perpetrators.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  A reasonable amount is literally any amount the market will tolerate. Seems 30% nolonger cuts it in any of these stores.
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    Exactly this, it's harder to make money on the store these days, people can't tolerate high fees anymore
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    You need a certain amount of competition before a market can give you a "reasonable" price. The market for phone app stores doesn't meet this bar.
  - vmladenov 6y ago
    MobiHand on BlackBerry, a third-party sales and distribution platform, used to take 40% and fees on top. I stopped working with them long before this incident, but appears that wasn’t enough[1]. When the Apple App Store launched with 70/30 it felt like a very generous offering, and the first-party App World launched with the same split later. [1] https://forums.crackberry.com/developers-lounge-f9/mobihand-payment-668639/index4.html https://forums.crackberry.com/developers-lounge-f9/mobihand-...
dfabulich 6y ago
Here's the next achievable goal to fight for: I want the fee structure Microsoft provides on the Microsoft Store. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2018/05/07/a-new-microsoft-store-revenue-share-is-coming/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2018/05/07/a-new-... Microsoft takes only a 5% cut if customers click on a link on my website with my referral code, taking them directly to the store details page. Otherwise, they take a 15% cut. > consumer applications (not including games) sold in Microsoft Store will deliver to developers 95% of the revenue earned from the purchase of your application or any in-app products in your application, when a customer uses a deep link to get to and purchase your application. When Microsoft delivers you a customer through any other method, such as in a collection on Microsoft Store or any other owned Microsoft properties, and purchases your application, you will receive 85% of the revenue earned from the purchase of your application or any in-app products in your application
- joebob42 6y ago
  One other case where imo the 5% should apply: if someone goes to the store and searches for your app by exact name. Ie if I go to the store and search "Netflix", the store hasn't helped me discover that product.
  - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
    That makes sense on paper, but in a world of instant search, search completion and search suggestion, doesn't it become a bit murky?
  - curryst 6y ago
    They have, in a way, by providing the index you use to find it. They're your portal to apps in a sense. Frankly it makes more sense to me to charge more when people find your app through the app store. It makes less sense to me that they take 15% if someone Googles your app to get the app store link. They didn't even use the app store search to find it.
- vishnumohandas 6y ago
  > 5% That’s less than the Stripe tax!
shoo 6y ago
I'm curious to estimate how much google's app store revenue would be decreased by this change in fee structure. Can anyone share accurate statistics on the distribution of app revenue per google play developer? I'm not familiar with the app dev business. There's a 2016 post from Mike Sonders about ios and android game revenue [1] that suggests that app revenue is extremely skewed, to the extent that 0.3% of apps in the category of top 500 action games accrue over 90% of the revenue. I.e. the top 1 or top 2 games out of the _top 500 games_ in the category get 90% of the revenue. If the same relationship holds for other categories, that suggests that the bottom 99.7% of the app distribution accounts for at most 10% of play store revenue, so cutting fees by 50% for the bottom 99% of developers would reduce google's rake by at most 5%. [1] https://medium.com/@sm_app_intel/a-bunch-of-average-app-revenue-data-and-why-you-should-ignore-it-2bea283d37fc https://medium.com/@sm_app_intel/a-bunch-of-average-app-reve...
cblconfederate 6y ago
This is not good for the quality of apps, it is impossible for apple or google to review all the spying apps and ensure they can spy with the highest standards of quality, without withholding at lest 30% of the revenue of developers from bangladesh. We will be doomed by spammers and scammers now, what a shame (/s)
dbrgn 6y ago
TLDR: Out of your firsts million dollars in yearly revenue that you make on Google Play, Google stoped billing you 300'000$ and now only bills you 150'000$. And they frame it in a way that suggests empowerment and goodwill. Seriously, when did fees of 15-30% for a service that you essentially cannot avoid as a software publisher become acceptable?
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  While I agree with you, most countries charge that and more in unavoidable taxes. The difference being that you can choose not to partecipate in their private stores (eg. develop on the web) but it's much harder to escape taxes.
  - fredophile 6y ago
    Why is it hard to avoid taxes? You can just move to a country with lower taxes.
shimfish 6y ago
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.
- WA 6y ago
  This is not true. Yes, Android users tend to pay less for apps, but useful apps that provide daily utility actually make good money as well. If you have a brand-name app like Runtastic, Netflix, Headspace or whatever, the platform doesn't really matter. You buy the product, because you want it. It's probably different for utility apps like a different Camera, a photo editor, small productivity apps you need only once per month. I'm happy about this change and it will definitely affect my bottom line in the range of several thousand euro per month – and I'm an indie dev. Edit: I just looked it up and calculated the difference. I will make roughly 17,000€ more per year through this change.
  - shimfish 6y ago
    I'll also make more because of it. I'm just saying that it won't make that much difference to the vast majority of developers.
    - darkwizard42 6y ago
      Yeah but that comment is kind of ignoring the segment for whom it does matter... There are tons of free crappy apps on Android, but for the ones that generate moderate value and are paid for because they are functional apps and not games or ad-ridden networking apps then this is a huge change. The "vast majority" of developers might just not be making apps that benefit from this but its a bit misleading to say this isn't a good change or helpful. If anything it will incentivize people to perhaps look into developing more away from an ad model into a sustainable paid model (given the margins just got 100% better)
jokethrowaway 6y ago
I wish developers would start using the browser more and rely less on the official stores which tax them unfairly. I don't want to install your application, just give me a good web mobile experience.
- rafaelturk 6y ago
  That's what we're doing. We're leaving both App Stores.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    Good on you! And if your app is FOSS, consider F-Droid among other options.
- candiddevmike 6y ago
  I wish we could in iOS. Apple's intentional crippling of PWAs should be illegal (push notifications supported on desktop Safari but not iOS?).
- NorwegianDude 6y ago
  The web platform is improving fast, but not on iOS. iOS is and has been "the new IE6" for a long time now, except that it's worse as you have no choice but to use it.
cletus 6y ago
Better title: Google matches what Apple already did. I said it about Apple and I’ll say it about Google: this is a PR move, nothing more. Google really missed an opportunity here to put Apple in a tough spot by just cutting it to 15%. Your biggest users of your payment infrastructure are also the most likely, most willing and most able to handle their own payments because they already do (eg Netflix, Epic). If either company has reduced their cut to 15% for only their largest customers then this would make sense as a business decision. Doing the opposite is trying to stave off government intervention, nothing more. The writing is on the wall for being the sole payments provider AND charging 30% for it. The only question is what they will be forced to do and (imho) you’re better off placating your biggest customers because they’re the ones who will likely sue you and lobby against you in the US/EU.
- hu3 6y ago
  Google's proposition is better still. If I make $2 million on Apple i'll have to pay $600k in fees. On Google it's $450k.
  - cletus 6y ago
    Does Apple really do that? If you make $1m, they'll take $150k but if you make $1 more they'll take $300k? Really? I assumed it wouldn't be that dumb. Is it really the case?
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      If you can convince apple to let you into the 15% program and then hit $2M, you'll pay $450k for that year and then get kicked out of the program. Subsequent years you will pay $600k if your revenue stays the same. If your revenue drops below $1M at some point, you'll have to pay 30% for that year, but the next year you'll be able to re-enter the program.
    - hu3 6y ago
      It's that dumb and convoluted like Dylan16807 explained.
    - 6y ago
Ploskin 6y ago
I always felt the discussion being focused on the platform tax to be a distraction. Sure, now app developers make more. Great. Doesn't change how unresponsive or draconian Google (and Apple) is in when they decide you aren't allowed to be on their Play Store anymore. Or how arbitrarily they choose to enforce their rules.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  The elephant in the room is Google and Apple's duopoly in mobile app distribution, which is the cause of the two problems in your post.
  - Ploskin 6y ago
    Something which is inevitable. It's hard to turn back the clock on something like this and I don't see any obvious solution for it, which is why both companies need to be regulated heavily to ensure they treat app developers fairly. If they're going to monopolize their own platforms, then whoever wants to sell on that platform needs to have guarantees that they aren't arbitrarily banned and that they have sane avenues to dispute any conflicts with Google or Apple. This is what regulation is for, to ensure fair marketplaces.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      Agreed, and it's not just app developers that would benefit from regulation, it's also billions of users. Consumers will benefit greatly from the increased efficiencies and lowered costs that real competition in the app distribution market will bring.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
40four 6y ago
Really a meaningless gesture if you ask me, reluctantly following Apple’s lead. A meager attempt to get regulators off their back. I believe Google & Apple should not be allowed to take a percentage at all. It should be a tiered system of fees, like a subscription or something. Sure, their systems help distribute and promote discovery of our apps, so let us pay for that. It should be a yearly fee appropriate for this service. The idea they they deserve to hover up a percentage of everyone’s business in perpetuity is completely bonkers. They don’t deserve it. But they do deserve to be paid for running the app store infrastructure and services.
- sumedh 6y ago
  > so let us pay for that. and what would be the fair price for that?
  - 40four 6y ago
    I have no idea. Whatever price Google or Apple determines they could run the service and make a profit. Apple already charges $100 a year, that seems like a reasonable starting point. If your business takes off, and you’re using more resources of the store, or you want to promote you app, you pay more. It could be tiered price levels depending on your usage and needs. Maybe once you cross a certain threshold of downloads then you have to bump up to the next tier. Maybe there would be an enterprise level for huge companies. Imagine if all developers on Google play started off paying $100 a year, that alone would weed out a lot of the BS & discourage low effort bad actors.
    - sumedh 6y ago
      > Whatever price Google or Apple determines they could run the service and make a profit. Isn't that what they are doing now? You are essentially arguing that those giants should take a small profit instead of huge profit.
      - 40four 6y ago
        Not not at all. What they are doing now is taking advantage of their position of power. I think you’re being difficult on purpose. You know what I’m arguing. You don’t agree and that’s ok. But please don’t act like you don’t get it, and twist my point. I’m arguing that what they are taking is not worth what they are offering. A 30% cut of your hard earned business is loan shark and pawn broker territory. Ok, now it’s 15% until you get really successful. I don’t care 10%, 5%. I believe any percentage makes no sense for the the service they are providing. This isn’t ‘Shark Tank’ the TV show. App developers aren’t coming and asking for loans to fund their startup idea. That would be the type of scenario where it would be expected to take a percentage of the company. We give you ‘X’ amount of dollars up front to fund your company, but we get ‘X’ percent of the money you make. Hell, even Y Combinator is in this business. That’s when you should get a percentage. Not when hey, we run the only app distribution service and we’re going to keep it that way. Now, I’ve ranted way too much in this point :) and I think I’ve made good clear points. Could you please provide good reasons why you think 15%-30% of your whole business is rightfully Google’s to take? I’m willing to be persuaded.
KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
Thank you Epic Games.
giantg2 6y ago
My apps are free, so...
avipars 6y ago
Starting on July 1, 2021 we are reducing the service fee Google Play receives when a developer sells digital goods or services to 15% for the first $1M (USD) of revenue every developer earns each year. With this change, 99% of developers globally that sell digital goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees. These are funds that can help developers scale up at a critical phase of their growth by hiring more engineers, adding to their marketing staff, increasing server capacity, and more.
nt2h9uh238h 6y ago
Love it
martini333 6y ago
wow, such generosity!
Fizzer 6y ago
> we’ve heard from our partners making $2M, $5M and even $10M a year that their services are still on a path to self-sustaining orbit. What does this even mean? "on a path to self-sustaining" makes it seem like they're not currently self-sustainable. Given the crazy profit margins in software, I find it hard to believe that most apps making millions per year are not sustainable.
skizm 6y ago
This would have accounted for around 5% of the Play Store's revenue if applied for 2020: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/google-apple-giving-up-less-than-5percent-of-revenue-from-apps-with-pay-changes-estimate.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/google-apple-giving-up-less-...
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Giving 5% of your revenue (not profit) right back into the pockets of smaller developers seems pretty great overall. Did people expect them to cut their revenue in half?
  - skizm 6y ago
    I expected nothing, just providing context. I agree this is very positive and costs Apple and Google very little. Seems like a win win.
es7 6y ago
This is awesome news! I was just lamenting that my Play Store "earnings" are so much lower than my "revenue". This will help me as an indie developer make my app offerings a meaningfully larger part of my livelihood.
grumple 6y ago
I think this does make an impact. At 30% I wasn't even slightly considering trying to make money from a mobile app. At 15% it at least becomes an idea, though that's still a pretty high percentage just to be listed and distributed in a store.

501 points by h43k3r 6y ago

Wow! Finally Google play store has reached the economies of scale, I'm wondering when will Apple do? /sarcasm

> To aid their quest for growth we provide a broad range of support, (...) Funny that it then goes on to list lots of stuff where no human support is actually involved. The support developers want is to get a person to talk to when Google's algorithms ban their app or account for no reason and wrecks their business.

shimfish 6y ago
I've been trying for ages to get Google to take down spam/scam apps that use my apps name and screenshots but just add "tips" or "guide" to pretend they're legit. Nothing doing. Still about 50 imitation apps that come up in their search when looking for my app.

unsungNovelty 6y ago

This is also just catching up with Apple by the way - https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-store-small-business-program/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s.... Very similar. While I have had reservations on people marching for third party stores in iOS, maybe it is not a bad idea. But what if Epic, FB and Google just create a new app store with their privacy invasive ways? This bugs me. Sure it is hard but a coalition can make it possible right? Either way, we need to ask for better terms for sure.

hu3 6y ago
Sure, if by catching up to Apple you mean also throwing a bone to reduce anti-thrust pressure [1] and help their case against Epic and Spotify [2]. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/18/app-store-commission-cut-antitrust-complaints-and-investigations-continue/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/18/app-store-commission-cut-anti... [2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/13/spotify-supports-epic-games-private-antitrust-action-against-apple https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/13/spotify-supports-...

chiaki123 6y ago

Very good! Love Google

chiaki123 6y ago

Check out Apple's margins for their services unit. Not sure of if Google publishes this data, but they may.

Crazyontap 6y ago

I sometimes wonder if Apple didn't come up with this model of charging devs 30% even Google wouldn't have too. These companies often end up with similar policies. But that one greedy kid showed everyone how easy it is to leech off on hard work of devs (who are also to be blame as we happily agreed to this BS) and now it's a common practice. If safari browser had a Safari store with 30% cut pretty sure chrome extension store would also be charging 30% instead of their 5% now.

koonsolo 6y ago
30% is pretty common, just look at Steam. You can download and install games on you Windows machine straight from any website. Yet Steam was able to take a 30% cut and be very successful. The fact remains that developers are very happy to give 30% when their sales increase with a few factors.
- dbrgn 6y ago
  That argument may be valid for Steam. But Google Play is a de-facto monopoly and the Apple App Store is a full (and enforced) monopoly. They can charge 30% because there is no viable alternative for the developers.
- curryst 6y ago
  Steam also offers a more substantial service. They have fairly significant social services from chat to profiles to the ability to join a friend's game right from Steam. The downloads are also usually substantially larger (although the average price is also significantly higher). The same is true of most of the desktop game stores. I don't know what the real pricing should be, but I can't see how the pricing for something like Google's games would match up against Steam. They don't have feature parity, and some of the features they have are way less useful on mobile. E.g. I wouldn't use their chat even if it existed; my phone already has 4 or 5 messengers.

ecmascript 6y ago

While this is good, 15% is still a crazy unreasonable amount that makes me completely unwilling to create an app for these shitty companies. I urge everyone to simply just develop web apps and it will be competitive enough.

rvnx 6y ago

This is a very good change

agloeregrets 6y ago

This is compared to Apple's program where you have to make less than $1M to qualify the next/current year for 15%. Makes much more sense.

addicted 6y ago

I'm glad Google didn't choose the unnecessarily convoluted and worse solution Apple did that only adds more bureaucracy.

psaux 6y ago
“ The App Store's standard commission rate of 30 percent remains in place for apps selling digital goods and services and making more than $1 million in proceeds, defined as a developer's post-commission earnings” [1] What is convoluted and worse? I am not a mobile Dev at this time, just going by what I see online. Edit: [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-store-small-business-program/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  If you make $999k in revenue, you will receive almost $850k in profit. If you make $1000k in revenue, you will instead receive $700k in profit. You're strangely incentivized to completely shut down your app as you approach the 1000k mark, unless you're confident you'll make it past the 1200k mark, where it's worth it again. Silly system.
  - rabuse 6y ago
    That does seem terrible. It should be bracketed how our taxes are, honestly.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - psaux 6y ago
    Thank you, great information. Those incentives then have to change. I wrote a few apps back in the day, and 30% seemed high, but I never hit over $100k in rev. I was hoping the little guy who scaled would have won here.
  - shimfish 6y ago

Scoundreller 6y ago

When 0% first $1m? How much of a hit are they taking from 15%?

hanniabu 6y ago
They already have 0% for the first $0, don't be greedy. /s
- SilverRed 6y ago
  Well there was a $15 sign up fee last I checked (although last I checked was close to 10 years ago).
colechristensen 6y ago
Google isn't going to pay your card processing fees for you, and there is a nonzero cost to hosting and moderating the absolutely enormous number of apps that get nearly 0 revenue.
- SilverRed 6y ago
  I think 30% is actually perfectly fine for what they offer. Unlike on iOS, google gives you the option to opt out and distribute your own app with your own payments. 30% seems like a reasonable fee but the problem is when you are forced to pay it. As a small dev I'm happy to pay 30% for what is a great value. A company like netflix probably doesn't see as much value when the cost of doing their own payment processing becomes cheaper.

hanniabu 6y ago

I feel like they're feeling the pressure for a potential incumbent to come in and disrupt the market they've cornered. Who's in the best position to take a run on this? Or do you think it'd more likely to come from a new player?

colechristensen 6y ago
I feel like they are fearing antitrust actions in Europe and the US - and getting broken apart so pieces of themselves will be competing with other pieces.
lovedswain 6y ago
They're only thing they're feeling is the pressure of multiple regulators analysing the fine print

perryizgr8 6y ago

Shouldn't this be inverted? Small devs with unknown apps have more to gain from play store's distribution, and won't mind paying 30% of a smaller revenue in exchange for all the help. Bigger apps like Netflix are already doing their own advertising and marketing and have close to zero to gain from play store. And they will be making a large amount of revenue. According to this they will have to pay 30% of a larger amount. It feels backwards.

howinteresting 6y ago
As an exertion of raw power, yes, it would be inverted. But we live in a world where maximal exertion of raw power is looked down upon.
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  Don't most products and services offer a volume discount? Or something equivalent? I don't understand why the equation is reversed in this case. Does google not offer volume discounts to their big GCP customers? Is that also "looked down upon"?
  - howinteresting 6y ago
    Often there's an inverted U shaped curve, where startups and very large customers get discounts but medium-size customers don't.
adanto6840 6y ago
Valve [Steam] does this "inverted" model, as of ~ December 2018... It wasn't overly well-received on the PR front -- though I do suspect that it earned them a decent bit of AAA title/publisher credit, heh. Realistically, that's probably where much of the money is at; if anything, props to them for getting away with it.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  They had to do this because instead of regulatory pressure, they were feeling the opposite: Competitive options in the PC market. With Steam's high cut, any publisher large enough to make their own launcher should would be incredibly stupid not to do so, which is why Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Epic, etc. all have their own launchers now. And some of them have, or could, start selling third party titles as well. Valve is presumably hoping giving these large publishers a deal will cause them to reevaluate the effort in developing and maintaining their own storefronts. ...In otherwords, it's also an anticompetitive play, it's just the one that makes sense in Valve's particular monopoly space.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

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 hoping that this will stop some app developers from demanding the right to use third party payment processors, which would likely be used many of the larger >$1 million revenue publishers. The Android Police article about this cites an example from iOS, that "On Apple's App Store, the 98% of developers who qualified for a lower revenue share rate were responsible for less than 5% of Apple's total collected revenue"

enos_feedler 6y ago
The primary reason they are doing it is because Apple did it. Same goes for every other rev share change that Apple has implemented.
- DeusExMachina 6y ago
  That still poses the question: why did Apple do it? I believe the reasons are the ones explained by the parent comment. Also, I don't think Google mindlessly copies anything Apple does. Sure, part of it is pure competition. But I'm sure they also evaluated the reasons behind Apple's decision.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Note that this is 4 months later. That's about as quick as things like this can be done in a big organisation like Google where the decision has to go via policy, legal, engineering, translation, etc.
  - enos_feedler 6y ago
    I believe that Google's goal is to show regulators that Apple has market power. The easiest way to demonstrate that is to follow what they do and make it look like they are in control. The reason I believe this is that it is uncharacteristic of Google to blatantly copy something like this over the years, yet it is clear they are fast following all of Apple's decisions around the app store. I would expect Google to try and differentiate and come out with a new, competitive way to make the developer ecosystem happy.

danShumway 6y ago

Further evidence that developer pressure and legal pressure on smartphone platforms work, that they aren't a waste of time. Prolonged campaigns for better terms can make a tangible difference, and we should be encouraged by this result to advocate for even better terms. It turns out that when they have real pressure, it is possible for Google and Apple to come up with better terms. Keep in mind that the reason Google is being sued for antitrust isn't because it was taking 30% -- it's because it forced manufactures not to install or bundle any 3rd party stores by threatening to remove access to the Play store if any competing storefronts were enabled by default on consumer devices. So this doesn't change the original complaint, but it's still a very big win for smaller developers.

nmfisher 6y ago
> Further evidence that developer pressure and legal pressure on smartphone platforms work, that they aren't a waste of time. Sure, if you're Epic. For the rest of us minnows, we just have to play the hand we're dealt.
- danShumway 6y ago
  This change directly impacts minnows, it's a revenue cut for companies making less than a million dollars, not more. And if your point is that it took a company as large as Epic raising a fuss to get that change, well... why should I care? It's still a change that will help smaller developers. Honestly, I don't get HN's position on this. When Epic sued, people complained that Epic was too big and progress would only be made if an ideologically pure company pushed for it. When conversation started talking about regulation, I heard people complain that it wasn't going to go anywhere and that regulators didn't care. Then when other companies like Hey and Microsoft started joining in making statements against current app store terms, people complained there weren't going to be any changes, that this was just a farce that would result in at best a backroom deal with Epic and/or Microsoft that wouldn't affect smaller devs. Now there's a tangible policy change that will have a huge impact on smaller devs, and the complaint is that the wrong company had a role in it? What do you want?
  - 6y ago

onetimemanytime 6y ago

Honestly those making tens of millions deserve this even more from an economical perspective. There is cost of running the store but once you gross, say $100M, paying $30M to Google is kinda harsh.

oh_sigh 6y ago

Wow, it sure is a coincidence that its being cut to basically the same rate (though a different structuring) as Apple. First google independently came up with the 30% rate just like Apple did, and then they independently came up with 15% for the first $1M like Apple did.

jahmed 6y ago
I get the sarcasm but really its a duopoly game like a Stackleberg. The best move is to match and not try to undercut.
- fakedang 6y ago
  This kind of price matching is the perfect definition of a duopoly.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Right. But you would never even know that another company existed reading their PR piece about how they're doing it for the developers.
danShumway 6y ago
It is amazing how quickly "industry standard" prices can change after just one company deviates from them. It's almost like the standard wasn't ever set in stone or based on careful cost-benefit analysis to begin with.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Sounds more like a price-fixing cartel, and they are only acting now because they're afraid of anti-trust litigation.
croes 6y ago
It has nothing to do with the antitrust lawsuits.

jmsflknr 6y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26477802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26477802

pvg 6y ago
It's not an HN dupe if there hasn't been any discussion

tener 6y ago

I think it is also likely that >1M$ developers can start negotiating custom agreements. Hard to say how much exactly is their negotiating power in that case, but it is probably non-zero.

danybittel 6y ago

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 any marketing / visibility are long gone. I think more "fair" is something like 5%, more in the line of what a payment processor does. Which probably, at this point does more than.

loosetypes 6y ago
Masters of Doom described a similar sentiment circa ‘93 only now “tech” are the perpetrators.
Waterluvian 6y ago
A reasonable amount is literally any amount the market will tolerate. Seems 30% nolonger cuts it in any of these stores.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  Exactly this, it's harder to make money on the store these days, people can't tolerate high fees anymore
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  You need a certain amount of competition before a market can give you a "reasonable" price. The market for phone app stores doesn't meet this bar.
- vmladenov 6y ago
  MobiHand on BlackBerry, a third-party sales and distribution platform, used to take 40% and fees on top. I stopped working with them long before this incident, but appears that wasn’t enough[1]. When the Apple App Store launched with 70/30 it felt like a very generous offering, and the first-party App World launched with the same split later. [1] https://forums.crackberry.com/developers-lounge-f9/mobihand-payment-668639/index4.html https://forums.crackberry.com/developers-lounge-f9/mobihand-...

dfabulich 6y ago

Here's the next achievable goal to fight for: I want the fee structure Microsoft provides on the Microsoft Store. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2018/05/07/a-new-microsoft-store-revenue-share-is-coming/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2018/05/07/a-new-... Microsoft takes only a 5% cut if customers click on a link on my website with my referral code, taking them directly to the store details page. Otherwise, they take a 15% cut. > consumer applications (not including games) sold in Microsoft Store will deliver to developers 95% of the revenue earned from the purchase of your application or any in-app products in your application, when a customer uses a deep link to get to and purchase your application. When Microsoft delivers you a customer through any other method, such as in a collection on Microsoft Store or any other owned Microsoft properties, and purchases your application, you will receive 85% of the revenue earned from the purchase of your application or any in-app products in your application

joebob42 6y ago
One other case where imo the 5% should apply: if someone goes to the store and searches for your app by exact name. Ie if I go to the store and search "Netflix", the store hasn't helped me discover that product.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  That makes sense on paper, but in a world of instant search, search completion and search suggestion, doesn't it become a bit murky?
- curryst 6y ago
  They have, in a way, by providing the index you use to find it. They're your portal to apps in a sense. Frankly it makes more sense to me to charge more when people find your app through the app store. It makes less sense to me that they take 15% if someone Googles your app to get the app store link. They didn't even use the app store search to find it.
vishnumohandas 6y ago
> 5% That’s less than the Stripe tax!

shoo 6y ago

I'm curious to estimate how much google's app store revenue would be decreased by this change in fee structure. Can anyone share accurate statistics on the distribution of app revenue per google play developer? I'm not familiar with the app dev business. There's a 2016 post from Mike Sonders about ios and android game revenue [1] that suggests that app revenue is extremely skewed, to the extent that 0.3% of apps in the category of top 500 action games accrue over 90% of the revenue. I.e. the top 1 or top 2 games out of the _top 500 games_ in the category get 90% of the revenue. If the same relationship holds for other categories, that suggests that the bottom 99.7% of the app distribution accounts for at most 10% of play store revenue, so cutting fees by 50% for the bottom 99% of developers would reduce google's rake by at most 5%. [1] https://medium.com/@sm_app_intel/a-bunch-of-average-app-revenue-data-and-why-you-should-ignore-it-2bea283d37fc https://medium.com/@sm_app_intel/a-bunch-of-average-app-reve...

cblconfederate 6y ago

This is not good for the quality of apps, it is impossible for apple or google to review all the spying apps and ensure they can spy with the highest standards of quality, without withholding at lest 30% of the revenue of developers from bangladesh. We will be doomed by spammers and scammers now, what a shame (/s)

dbrgn 6y ago

TLDR: Out of your firsts million dollars in yearly revenue that you make on Google Play, Google stoped billing you 300'000$ and now only bills you 150'000$. And they frame it in a way that suggests empowerment and goodwill. Seriously, when did fees of 15-30% for a service that you essentially cannot avoid as a software publisher become acceptable?

jokethrowaway 6y ago
While I agree with you, most countries charge that and more in unavoidable taxes. The difference being that you can choose not to partecipate in their private stores (eg. develop on the web) but it's much harder to escape taxes.
- fredophile 6y ago
  Why is it hard to avoid taxes? You can just move to a country with lower taxes.

shimfish 6y ago

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.

WA 6y ago
This is not true. Yes, Android users tend to pay less for apps, but useful apps that provide daily utility actually make good money as well. If you have a brand-name app like Runtastic, Netflix, Headspace or whatever, the platform doesn't really matter. You buy the product, because you want it. It's probably different for utility apps like a different Camera, a photo editor, small productivity apps you need only once per month. I'm happy about this change and it will definitely affect my bottom line in the range of several thousand euro per month – and I'm an indie dev. Edit: I just looked it up and calculated the difference. I will make roughly 17,000€ more per year through this change.
- shimfish 6y ago
  I'll also make more because of it. I'm just saying that it won't make that much difference to the vast majority of developers.
  - darkwizard42 6y ago
    Yeah but that comment is kind of ignoring the segment for whom it does matter... There are tons of free crappy apps on Android, but for the ones that generate moderate value and are paid for because they are functional apps and not games or ad-ridden networking apps then this is a huge change. The "vast majority" of developers might just not be making apps that benefit from this but its a bit misleading to say this isn't a good change or helpful. If anything it will incentivize people to perhaps look into developing more away from an ad model into a sustainable paid model (given the margins just got 100% better)

jokethrowaway 6y ago

I wish developers would start using the browser more and rely less on the official stores which tax them unfairly. I don't want to install your application, just give me a good web mobile experience.

rafaelturk 6y ago
That's what we're doing. We're leaving both App Stores.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  Good on you! And if your app is FOSS, consider F-Droid among other options.
candiddevmike 6y ago
I wish we could in iOS. Apple's intentional crippling of PWAs should be illegal (push notifications supported on desktop Safari but not iOS?).
NorwegianDude 6y ago
The web platform is improving fast, but not on iOS. iOS is and has been "the new IE6" for a long time now, except that it's worse as you have no choice but to use it.

cletus 6y ago

Better title: Google matches what Apple already did. I said it about Apple and I’ll say it about Google: this is a PR move, nothing more. Google really missed an opportunity here to put Apple in a tough spot by just cutting it to 15%. Your biggest users of your payment infrastructure are also the most likely, most willing and most able to handle their own payments because they already do (eg Netflix, Epic). If either company has reduced their cut to 15% for only their largest customers then this would make sense as a business decision. Doing the opposite is trying to stave off government intervention, nothing more. The writing is on the wall for being the sole payments provider AND charging 30% for it. The only question is what they will be forced to do and (imho) you’re better off placating your biggest customers because they’re the ones who will likely sue you and lobby against you in the US/EU.

hu3 6y ago
Google's proposition is better still. If I make $2 million on Apple i'll have to pay $600k in fees. On Google it's $450k.
- cletus 6y ago
  Does Apple really do that? If you make $1m, they'll take $150k but if you make $1 more they'll take $300k? Really? I assumed it wouldn't be that dumb. Is it really the case?
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    If you can convince apple to let you into the 15% program and then hit $2M, you'll pay $450k for that year and then get kicked out of the program. Subsequent years you will pay $600k if your revenue stays the same. If your revenue drops below $1M at some point, you'll have to pay 30% for that year, but the next year you'll be able to re-enter the program.
  - hu3 6y ago
    It's that dumb and convoluted like Dylan16807 explained.
  - 6y ago

Ploskin 6y ago

I always felt the discussion being focused on the platform tax to be a distraction. Sure, now app developers make more. Great. Doesn't change how unresponsive or draconian Google (and Apple) is in when they decide you aren't allowed to be on their Play Store anymore. Or how arbitrarily they choose to enforce their rules.

heavyset_go 6y ago
The elephant in the room is Google and Apple's duopoly in mobile app distribution, which is the cause of the two problems in your post.
- Ploskin 6y ago
  Something which is inevitable. It's hard to turn back the clock on something like this and I don't see any obvious solution for it, which is why both companies need to be regulated heavily to ensure they treat app developers fairly. If they're going to monopolize their own platforms, then whoever wants to sell on that platform needs to have guarantees that they aren't arbitrarily banned and that they have sane avenues to dispute any conflicts with Google or Apple. This is what regulation is for, to ensure fair marketplaces.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Agreed, and it's not just app developers that would benefit from regulation, it's also billions of users. Consumers will benefit greatly from the increased efficiencies and lowered costs that real competition in the app distribution market will bring.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

40four 6y ago

Really a meaningless gesture if you ask me, reluctantly following Apple’s lead. A meager attempt to get regulators off their back. I believe Google & Apple should not be allowed to take a percentage at all. It should be a tiered system of fees, like a subscription or something. Sure, their systems help distribute and promote discovery of our apps, so let us pay for that. It should be a yearly fee appropriate for this service. The idea they they deserve to hover up a percentage of everyone’s business in perpetuity is completely bonkers. They don’t deserve it. But they do deserve to be paid for running the app store infrastructure and services.

sumedh 6y ago
> so let us pay for that. and what would be the fair price for that?
- 40four 6y ago
  I have no idea. Whatever price Google or Apple determines they could run the service and make a profit. Apple already charges $100 a year, that seems like a reasonable starting point. If your business takes off, and you’re using more resources of the store, or you want to promote you app, you pay more. It could be tiered price levels depending on your usage and needs. Maybe once you cross a certain threshold of downloads then you have to bump up to the next tier. Maybe there would be an enterprise level for huge companies. Imagine if all developers on Google play started off paying $100 a year, that alone would weed out a lot of the BS & discourage low effort bad actors.
  - sumedh 6y ago
    > Whatever price Google or Apple determines they could run the service and make a profit. Isn't that what they are doing now? You are essentially arguing that those giants should take a small profit instead of huge profit.
    - 40four 6y ago
      Not not at all. What they are doing now is taking advantage of their position of power. I think you’re being difficult on purpose. You know what I’m arguing. You don’t agree and that’s ok. But please don’t act like you don’t get it, and twist my point. I’m arguing that what they are taking is not worth what they are offering. A 30% cut of your hard earned business is loan shark and pawn broker territory. Ok, now it’s 15% until you get really successful. I don’t care 10%, 5%. I believe any percentage makes no sense for the the service they are providing. This isn’t ‘Shark Tank’ the TV show. App developers aren’t coming and asking for loans to fund their startup idea. That would be the type of scenario where it would be expected to take a percentage of the company. We give you ‘X’ amount of dollars up front to fund your company, but we get ‘X’ percent of the money you make. Hell, even Y Combinator is in this business. That’s when you should get a percentage. Not when hey, we run the only app distribution service and we’re going to keep it that way. Now, I’ve ranted way too much in this point :) and I think I’ve made good clear points. Could you please provide good reasons why you think 15%-30% of your whole business is rightfully Google’s to take? I’m willing to be persuaded.

KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago

Thank you Epic Games.

giantg2 6y ago

My apps are free, so...

avipars 6y ago

Starting on July 1, 2021 we are reducing the service fee Google Play receives when a developer sells digital goods or services to 15% for the first $1M (USD) of revenue every developer earns each year. With this change, 99% of developers globally that sell digital goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees. These are funds that can help developers scale up at a critical phase of their growth by hiring more engineers, adding to their marketing staff, increasing server capacity, and more.

nt2h9uh238h 6y ago

Love it

martini333 6y ago

wow, such generosity!

Fizzer 6y ago

> we’ve heard from our partners making $2M, $5M and even $10M a year that their services are still on a path to self-sustaining orbit. What does this even mean? "on a path to self-sustaining" makes it seem like they're not currently self-sustainable. Given the crazy profit margins in software, I find it hard to believe that most apps making millions per year are not sustainable.

skizm 6y ago

This would have accounted for around 5% of the Play Store's revenue if applied for 2020: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/google-apple-giving-up-less-than-5percent-of-revenue-from-apps-with-pay-changes-estimate.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/google-apple-giving-up-less-...

ehsankia 6y ago
Giving 5% of your revenue (not profit) right back into the pockets of smaller developers seems pretty great overall. Did people expect them to cut their revenue in half?
- skizm 6y ago
  I expected nothing, just providing context. I agree this is very positive and costs Apple and Google very little. Seems like a win win.

es7 6y ago

This is awesome news! I was just lamenting that my Play Store "earnings" are so much lower than my "revenue". This will help me as an indie developer make my app offerings a meaningfully larger part of my livelihood.

grumple 6y ago

I think this does make an impact. At 30% I wasn't even slightly considering trying to make money from a mobile app. At 15% it at least becomes an idea, though that's still a pretty high percentage just to be listed and distributed in a store.