Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

>The Chrome Web Store and the Microsoft Store do not offer features for supporting extension developers.

That doesn't seem right - doesn't Google let developers monetize extensions in the chrome web store?

     You can publish Hosted Apps, Chrome Apps, Chrome
     Extensions, and Themes in the Chrome Web Store.
     Collectively these are called simply "Items". You have 
     many choices when it comes to making money from items 
     that you publish in the Chrome Web Store. This page 
     covers just a few ways to monetize your store item:

     - In-app payments
     - One-time charge
     - Subscription
     - Offering a limited trial version of your item

https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/money

The issue of developers selling out their chrome extensions to 3P (that the author references) probably has more to do with the fact that bad actors get better money for harvesting user PII than the developer would if they maintained the extension as it was originally meant to be. This is a real privacy issue, but it's also why Chrome cracked down on extension APIs recently by restricting what is shared with the extension.

Google's Web Store payments system is terrible in my experience. I haven't been able to export accounting data for https://autoplaylists.simon.codes since April 2018: I spent almost a year badgering support so I could properly file my taxes.

A letter from the New York AG got them to respond, but I still need to email them every time I need my data (they get an engineer to run a db query manually, from what I can tell).

I did get an email today that they're migrating to a new system, so maybe it'll work in the future, but I wouldn't trust them based on what I've seen.

> it's also why Chrome cracked down on extension APIs recently by restricting what is shared with the extension

It'd be nice if they had 'trusted devs' or similar. Even if they provided a paid meatbag extension review service, I'd pay to get the plugins I use reviewed!

That's an interesting idea. I, too, would happily contribute to a funding pool to have a competent human analyze the extensions that I'm using. One would expect this to (loosely) allocate money to checking the extensions that are most used, so the ecosystem would benefit even for people who weren't contributing.

And corporations would pay a lot to have extensions security reviewed if they had a business use case.

Very nice idea. As an ISV with a freemium open-source extension, I would happily pay for an official security review that I could present to our users. Our extension is secure by design but having a 3rd-party expert (e. g. Google or Firefox reviewer) confirm this and get a "Reviewed" badge would be great. The drawback is that this could slow down extension updates, as you do not want to loose this badge with the next update. But that is manageable.

The Web Store Payments API is trash. I waded through the out-of-date, sparse documentation and examples, trawled stack overflow and 'Chromium Extensions' Google Group. Spent weeks of my life trying to find work arounds to various issues. Thinking of setting up a github repo with documentation about all the issues and workarounds. Shame on Google that they leave this online.

In the end, I couldn't get something satisfactory working, and went with Paddle for payments. Cost per transaction is quite high in our case ($0.75 on a $5 monthly subscription) but it was fairly painless to set up, and they handle VAT/sales tax. Would love to find a way to offer $3/month subscriptions without handling tax ourselves.

The web store ecosystem is atrocious. You cannot rely on Google's browser services to make money. They will randomly take down your extension for a ~month in response to malformed (i.e. invalid and illegal) DMCA notices, and they barely maintain the developer tools - I've watched key parts of the developer dashboard break and go unfixed for months even after reporting them.

If you want to do this stuff you have to do it all from scratch and hope Google doesn't decide to get mad at you.

They also make it very hard to push updates promptly which means if a major bug or security issue is found it can take multiple days for users to get a fix, so you end up having to find your own way to push updates (despite the fact that store policy sort of prohibits doing so).

I've developed apps for Chromeos which share a lot of the same docs as extensions and these are some of the worst docs I've ever used. Incomplete, outdated, confusing, etc.

It feels as if Google doesn't want you to actually make Chromeos apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com