Yeah, that is the real question.
Google already has special deals for companies that lowers the 30% fee significantly.
(I think even 2-3% fee is too much for doing basically nothing, but that is another discussion).
Google already has special deals for companies that lowers the 30% fee significantly.
(I think even 2-3% fee is too much for doing basically nothing, but that is another discussion).
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.
It's not a closed ecosystem anyway, I think. As far as I can tell, all the devices that officially have Google Play, also allow other applications to install APKs; now in a very fine-grained and straightforward way (as of Android 9).
<1% ?
If Google came up with a magical technique to get rid of all malware on their app store that didn't cost them a dime, you could still argue that they're adding value to justify the 30% cut.
If Google spends a billion dollars to get rid of all the malware on their app store, and it doesn't work, and using the app store is not significantly less dangerous than sideloading apps, then they're not adding any value to justify the 30% cut.
Note that I don't think Google's efforts are completely fruitless. At the very least, they seem to help with taking down duplicate apps, and that's something. But whether or not moderation is valuable only depends on whether they succeed or not -- their effort is irrelevant.
With nobody to filter out impersonators and repackaging of an app with added malware ?
Google will probably approve anything that's not an obvious malware but not much more than that
For example Chinese hackers added hidden code to 34 legit apps totaling 500 millions downloads and Apple didn't notice a thing.
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xcodeghost-chinese-malw...
Happy now?
Developing The Android platform is a benefit for Google, not for the app makers.
30% is ridiculous for Apple and Google. It's an arbitrary number that they could get away with when the Appstore came out nine years ago and everyone ran with it ever since.
I don't know what a fair amount is. But I doubt it's in the two digits.
When Apple announced 30% cut, mobile devs where cheering, because many providers were charging way above 50%.
Well, I guess Symbian got N-Gage and the Ovi Store towards the end, but they never tried to lock it down against third party sources.
You just have one large customer in one country instead of thousands/millions in many different jurisdictions each with its own tax and consumer protection laws. That's worth more than 2.5% but it's not worth 30%.
I would say fair is somewhere between 5% and 10%, considering they also provide some distribution infrastructure on top of payments, billing, taxes and compliance.
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.
Yes, you shouldn’t float a balance on your card - but the average person often does.
They can start their own currency, but only facebook is going that way and it takes a long time.
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.
Yea 2% fee is too much because bandwidth is free.
Source?