Google launches third-party billing pilot on Play Store, but only cuts charges by 4%

Expand google play

Google is slowly opening Play Store billing policies. The "user-choice billing" pilot program that was announced in March is now accepting registrations. Google describes the program in a support article: "This pilot project is designed to test offering an alternative billing option alongside Google Play's billing system and to help us explore offering this choice. to users. We seek feedback in different countries and ensure that we can maintain a positive user experience."

Developers interested in billing through another provider can fill out Google's registration form, and it looks like Google will manually review each app. Currently supported regions are European Economic Area (i.e. Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden), Australia, India, Indonesia and Japan.

Google won't allow developers to use the pilot program for games (the biggest money makers), only for apps.

With "user-choice billing", when a user accesses the payment system, a box is displayed asking them if they want to use Google Play billing or another third-party service. (This list of choices should include Google Play Billing.) However, in the European Economic Area, developers already have the option of not using Google Play Billing at all, thanks to law. in EU digital markets.

With the exception of a few promotional tiers, Google and Apple take about 30% off not only for newly downloaded app purchases, but also for digital purchases in already downloaded apps. Many developers view these fees as excessive, and the push within both ecosystems to allow third-party billing was initially touted as a solution to high app store fees. Various regulators forced the Google/Apple app store duopoly to open up payments, but Google and Apple each did it without solving the central problem of high app store fees . Apple charges 27% of purchases processed outside of the App Store, which is the upfront 30% fee minus the usual 3% processing fee charged by credit card companies. Google is doing something similar with this new program and will only reduce its fees by 4%.

You'll still have to pay some sort of fee to your third-party payment processor, so with just a 4% cut from Google, developers won't really save any money. Registrations are open now, if you are interested!