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Comment by faze | Hacker News Reader

And why would I put in time learning these APIs if I have no guarantees they will continue existing?

That's pretty much true of any service you don't control.

That's more true for Google since very few of its product are actually making money. Everything comes from advertising, which comes mainly from Google search. This they have no real incentive to keep any product that doesn't display ads.

A solution could be to let the users pay a little money for google services (and avoid tracking / use of its data for advertising? )

Google's "other revenue"[0] for Q3 was $3.4 billion of the $27 billion it made that quarter. Other revenue is mainly Play, Cloud, and Hardware. So I'd say Google is making a lot of money from other avenues.

[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204417...

Google is the master of leeching and rent-seeking.

Just as they pit advertisers against each other to drive up prices for impressions on third party sites, for which they keep a large middelman fee, they use the same tactics on Google Play. Developers get to bid on the #1 search result spot, while Google is milking them for 30% of gross revenue for providing a rather abysmal ZIP file download service. They are only able to charge such high fees because of the exclusivity and network effects from being pre-installed on every GMS Android phone.

Other examples of similar rent-seeking platforms are Apple App Store, Windows Store, Steam.

Many Google APIs either offer paid premium tiers (eg. Maps) or are pay per use (all Cloud APIs).

They have plenty of commercial products and Google Cloud Platform is likely to make more money then the entire ads business in the future.

and the ones you do...

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