Tinder Bypasses Google Play, Joining Revolt Against App Store Fee

According to this: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

These countries do not support merchant accounts: Antigua and Barbuda Angola Aruba Barbados Benin Bermuda Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana British Indian Ocean Territory British Virgin Islands Burkina Faso Cameroon Cape Verde Cote d'Ivoire El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Falkland Islands Faroe Islands Gabon Georgia Gibraltar Greenland Liechtenstein Mali Monaco Montenegro Morocco Mozambique Nepal Netherlands Antilles Rwanda San Marino Senegal Serbia Seychelles Tajikistan Togo Turkmenistan Vatican City

Some of those are in Europe, but which in particular were you concerned about?

This is incorrect. F-droid is quite extensive.

My guess is that the play store fee works more like a tax on a closed ecosystem than a price for a service. For example, when the government needs to pay for a more expansive healthcare bill, they may decide it makes more economic sense (or is more politically viable) to raise the additional funding through a tax that doesn't go back to most of the people who receive the benefits. So maybe they raise capital gains taxes, etc.

Likewise, while Google is an ads company, and running Android does benefit them some in that regard (e.g. ecosystem lockin), they're not running it as a charity. Android being given away for free, and many phones being subsidized, both benefit a lot of people, and because Google has more or less complete control of the market, they've decided the best way to pay for it is to tax the Play store, instead of charging those people for the benefit.

They important thing I'm trying to point out here is that they could do it differently - they could charge for Android, or require subscriptions to use more of their services, but they've decided the best way to monetize is through the store. In this case, the question of whether the fee is "reasonable" for what Google provides to app developers isn't quite as significant as it would be were Google simply providing a product on the free market.

But in this case I suspect you're both right, anyway, and this likely has more to do with data collection.

The ecosystem may be better off with something like 20c + 20% transaction fees. But, a flat percentage needs to be surprisingly high just to breakeven.

Yea 2% fee is too much because bandwidth is free.

Handling publication, payments, giving exposure and direct access via the play store, approving the apps, rejecting impersonations, the play store platform actually does a lot of stuff.

I agree that a 30% fee is a lot and probably way too much, but claiming that they do nothing is just ridiculous.

Source?

IIRC this change was introduced in API 23 (marshmallow), now a while ago.

Before that Android version, permissions (such as accessing your contacts or your calendar, using the camera sensor, etc) where requested and given at installation time.

23 introduced runtime permission : now you don't get the permissions at install time but at runtime : while the app run it incrementally asks to access your contacts, camera, or whatever else it needs.

But there is an issue : how to handle all the existing apps ?

What happens is that apps declare which sdk version they are targetting when they are compiled. If that version is 23 or higher, they get the new behavior.

For apps targeting 22 or less though, the system fallbacks to the previous behavior.

This way apps don't suddenly break when you update your phone and apps already published on the play store don't have to handle this change right away.

Most apps, especially popular ones have been pretty quick to follow these new targets.

However, some apps (cough like snapchat cough) have seen a loophole there and have been keeping their target sdk very low so they don't have to follow new behaviors.

So a couple of years ago Google decided to address that : now if you want to publish a new app, you have to target an android version that is at most one year old. App updates have the same rule, although IIRC the period is a little bit longer.

So it is no longer possible to game a system that is only there to gracefully handle old apps.

I have mentioned runtime permission because it is one change that is easy to explain, but each Android version has several behavior/security changes like this one, so enforcing this rule is definitely for the best.

Not to pick on you specifically, but this view is way too wrong to be so common.

The information economy is fundamentally different from the industrial economy for (at least) two reasons:

- Extremely high capital intensity

- Positive reinforcement through network effects (same and cross-side)

As a result, market concentration in information and technology markets is extremely high compared with other industries. It's not a conspiracy, and it's not something anyone can change. It's just the nature of the product itself.

There are a few strategies to combat it (open source, adversarial interop, etc...) but "just build your own" isn't one of them. Because it's almost always impossible in practice.

There are enterprise distribution certificates that don't have these restrictions, but using them to distribute apps outside of the company will end up getting it revoked. (Like what happened with Facebook)

That the robber baron who owns the papers can say what he wants doesn't mean much to the man who is a black list for the rest of his life.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences indeed.

If Google or Apple collect the payment, you're paying Google or Apple, they take a cut, then a portion goes to Tinder.

Guess which one results in Tinder raising their prices?

You could argue that the app stores aren't a charity and don't operate for free - that they need money to exist. I'd argue that the app store model itself doesn't need to exist and that it's a form of greedy rent-seeking and power thirst. Besides, neither Apple nor Google are hurting from their phone monopoly.

The biggest improvement on the smartphones in this regard is not the app stores themself, it's the very tight sandboxing of apps that is the real enabler of the ecosystem. With such a good sandbox we could be installing apps from anywhere on the web as we did on windows before but at the same time not risk our whole system in the process as we did before.

Granted, Google probably is quite supportive of users vs app vendors, but the risk of losing their Google account is gigantic for many users, and there's no useful way to appeal (unless you happen to be in luck, your complaint goes viral and somebody from Google manually intervenes).

Perhaps they do, but the headline "X leaked data of millions of users" is more likely for X=Tinder than for X=Google, if you ask me.

The only thing that the actual vendor should see is a purchase from "a Discover customer."

Hell, for most online transactions I would like to proxy the whole thing. If I could give money to someone to buy things on my bealf and put their name, address, and shipping info instead of mine and then ship it to me I absolutely would every single time.

KakaoTalk [0] does this and I end up just having way more notifications because I don't want to leave someone "on read" until I get around to responding. Actually, many, if not most people "read" incoming texts via the preview from notification centers so they can read it without feeling like they have to respond right then.

I hate how it conditioned me over time to check repeatedly to see if someone had read my text or not. You could argue that they might've just wanted to respond later, but that's not the "culture" of how kakaotalk is used generally. I have some friends that take anywhere from ~3 days to 2 weeks to respond but they don't open the text until then. I vastly prefer imessage or other apps now simply because I can toggle off read receipts.

[0]: kakaotalk is the messaging app of Korea. I don't think I've ever had someone send me an actual text or phone call outside of KakaoTalk. Line (Japan) is similar and also has read receipts unfortunately.