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Comment by fpgeek | Hacker News Reader

If you'd love a 15 minute refund window, I wonder how you feel about the current Google Play refund window (2 hours).

See: http://www.androidcentral.com/google-play-support-page-confi...

I don't much see the point of a longer window than 15-30 min, to be honest. There are very few times when I've had to evaluate a mobile app for more than 5-10 minutes to decide whether or not it was worth the price of admission. A 15-30 minute window is a good compromise to trials, since it weeds out the folks who were never going to pay for the app anyway and doesn't require any significant risk on the side of the developer. No need to spend resources on developing special trial versions, and little risk that people will try the app, get the value out of it, then immediately refund. (Games with limited time of play, short stories, that kind of thing.)

Refunds post the window (but probably within some other window, like 30-90 days or so) should probably still be possible, but I'd be ok with those kinds of refunds requiring a higher barrier to entry – even if it is just filling out some forms. Plenty of apps I've paid for have gone the way of crappy updates you can't downgrade from, bringing bugs and what not along the way. I'd love to get a refund to those since I effectively can't use them anymore. It'd be an incentive for developers to not alienate current customers. Although, maybe paid upgrades would be a better solution to be honest.

Actually, Google offers a way bigger refund window. 2 hours is just the "no hassle" refund that the user can ask for by just tapping the 'refund' button in the app page. After this s/he can always (in theory) email the developer and ask for a refund since the dev can always issue a refund from the Payments Merchant Center [1]. It's essentially left up to the developer to create its own refund policy after the mandatory 2 hours. In my case, the request it's very unusual so I always issue one when asked (users have never taken more than a day to ask for one). Assuming the buyer knows this, what would be considered a reasonable time frame after which this kind of requests can be denied?

[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

There's another way to request the refund out of the refund window without messaging the developer [1]. Although I'm sure you can't do it indefinitely. The main gist is that Google covers the refunds after 48 hours :

"After 48 hours, Google bears the cost of the refund, which protects developers from retroactive negative earnings. In this case, the apps remain available in the user's library indefinitely. Lest you should think this is a loophole to get free paid apps forever, Google tells us it has mechanisms in place to prevent abuse. The company declined to elaborate on what those mechanisms were, but it likely has something to do with the amount and frequency of refund requests."

[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/05/16/google-quietly-imple...

Interesting, I may have to ask Google this but does that mean that if I refund after 48hrs from the Merchant Center do they still bear the cost of the refund?

Jesus. That is a terrible play and pushes devs away from the ecosystem. 2 hours only serves to hurt developers.

And 15 minutes?

I hope you're not arguing against any refund window at all. One can legitimately debate whether an appropriate window is 15 minutes, 2 hours, or a day but you should absolutely be able to get a refund if the program is unsatisfactory. Personally, it seems as if I might want more than 15 minutes to play around with a complex app, maybe going through a tutorial, etc. before deciding it doesn't work for me. If a developer is dependent on users not having a real chance to try out their app before paying their money, they should probably try to either improve their designs or take up another line of work.

2 hours is a preposterous amount of time for a "no-questions asked" return policy. No wonder devs don't put any effort in on the Play Store!

If an application can't deliver more than 2 hours of value, maybe it's not worth very much. It's not a movie. FWIW, the Apple app store doesn't have a formal time limit but you have to provide a reason.

Wow, what an entitled position to have.

You still haven't stated the reason for this claim. What's about "preposterous" for a 2 hours refund window ? Customer can fully test the app in those 2 hours and see if it fits him or not.

The problem isn't just the in money with the "it's only a buck or two for the app". You're trying to find an app you'll invest not just money, but time and your data. On iOS with this model it means you can spend 20-30$ for 5 different candidate apps and then choose one - or even find out you don't like any of them.

Now repeat this process for different types of apps that aren't multi-platform.

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