Chrome Web Store payments deprecation | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Web Store payments deprecation

developer.chrome.com

270 pointshibiscus4156169 comments

This is super annoying. I have two extensions, one which we've offered on Chrome and Firefox for years, and which uses Stripe for payments. The other we only offered on Chrome and was paid through the Chrome Store. Thinking of all the work we'll have to do to manage accounts/payments/etc on the PDF extension almost makes me want to scrap the whole thing.

Most frustrating is the migration. We have been live in the Chrome Store for 7 years, with varying prices. When someone subscribes, they are grandfathered at that price forever. But when we create our own payment system, how do we know what price someone was previously paying? We can either make our new customers really happy by charging all grandfathered users the lowest price we ever charged, or we can upset a bunch of our older customers by charging everyone the current price (which is 5x the former).

One fair way to accommodate everyone is charge the high price but if someone forwards us their receipt from the Chrome Store showing a different price, we apply a perpetual coupon to their account. But that will be super labor-intensive (and is susceptible to manipulation/abuse).

and annoying. you're charging your most loyal users the cost of providing proof after all these years.

Or don't. Just ask users to tell you (without any burden of proof) if they've been paying less. Will a handful of users abuse this? Probably. My bet is that the vast majority are honest people -- particularly if the circumstances are clearly and simply communicated -- and will not take undue advantage. The upside is that you won't be pissing off the honest majority, and the cost is probably (admittedly unprovably) small.

> My bet is that the vast majority are honest people

what makes you believe this? feel like this is Hobbes vs Rousseau

Are you able to query what they were paying? e.g. google.payments.inapp.getPurchases

Yeah, it looks like there is a way to do this. But this requires them to authenticate to allow it, and is a hassle on both ends. Seriously, what a huge pain for all involved. It is shocking they are giving such a short timeline for this transition, especially during COVID (they use COVID as an excuse for slow processing times, but clearly they don't care that devs would be similarly affected).

Maybe provide some options:

- Default to an automatic resubscription for (say) 50-75% of the current list price

- Consent to OAuth2<->Google ("one-time blahblahblah"), and retrieve perpetual payment info that way

- Accept Store receipts (capturing all email headers and keeping all PDFs for cross-comparison... meh)

I wonder if you should send 2 warning emails or 3. ("action required" "your account will automatically be subscribed unless...")

This is maybe a gray-ish pattern, but would convert some percentage of users to a higher ongoing subscription level. This sounds like a line-of-business type extension, so that percentage may be marginally appreciable.

Perhaps combat the boringness aspect of the store-receipt process by sending solicitation emails ASAP to get that rolling.

And, hrm, anticipate refunds. :(

Yeah, if we could email our customers that would be great. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to access the email addresses for our customers. Maybe I'm really dumb, but all I can find are anonymized transaction IDs.

It would be a lot better if they would allow us to contact our users via email. Instead, we're going to have to use pop-up messages that annoy users and are likely to be reflexively closed by many of them.

I'd love to know what they are communicating to users, and when. At least then we could wait to communicate with them until just after they send an email, so that users would be less likely to ignore our messages. As is, it feels like we're flying blind.

Oh noooo. I see now. The documentation helpfully completely sidesteps this probably quite widespread scenario!

Thinking about it, it's not really on point for Google™©® to connect you with your customers; your outreach could be considered unsolicited and G could be argued to be enabling spam. What a wonderful situation G has dug for itself here.

The only thought I can come up with is to partially break or otherwise "wait what"-ify your extension's behavior to concretely capture users' attention. You mentioned it does PDF processing of some kind; a relevant example in this case could be injecting new page(s) into generated output (or watermarking, but that may be mechanically trickier, and my knee-jerk connection to watermarking could wind up being "meep, this software has just gone rogue on me" - and depending on my stress level I may not actually read any notices).

Said injected (or overlaid) content would likely immediately first clarify that visiting the options page and clicking a giant green button will 100% revert functionality. It would probably also do well to include a website name (also showing a giant banner), a contact email address (RIP in advance), and possibly a suggestion/invitation to forward the PDF to internal IT for review in case of doubt (which would neatly offload some % of "???" to external labor that is incidentally highly trusted, but may look odd).

FWIW, I noticed the latest versions of Chrome have redesigned the extension UI; overflow icons have moved from the system menu into a dedicated popup. Some users (Windows) likely have this update, while others (eg, myself using Chromium 83.0/Debian, and version-locked enterprise users) don't. So hypothetical screenshots would need to illustrate both flows.

Besides all that, auto-renewing to some (non-low-end, because why not) percentage of the current list price, and straightforwardly handling refunds, seems to be the only obvious fallthrough I can see.

> Besides all that, auto-renewing to some (non-low-end, because why not) percentage of the current list price

Yeah, but we can't even auto-renew. We have to set up every customer new in Stripe and get their permission to charge them. There's literally no way for me to make this automatic. If Google is going to get rid of this functionality they should at least make it super easy for us to transition customers. Otherwise they're going to have a bunch of angry customers and devs on their hands.

Old school HN comment. useful

That really sucks. I’m guessing Google aggregates payments so there’s no way of getting individual subscription data?

If you explain the predicament clearly, succinctly, and with as easy a resolution as possible, I think a lot of your customers will understand the situation and appreciate that you’re doing your best for them.

Depending on what 5x is, you might not annoy as many users as you think.

I did a major pricing overhaul with my SaaS company a few years ago and made lots of sincere appeals to users. They generally supported me and the app. I had some churn, but I knee it was coming. It worked out for the best.

Of course, my experience is going to be unique but with the right transparency and explanation you may be overcome a lot of reflexive pushback.

Google should start announcing a month's worth of deprecations at a time to make it easier on us, like how Microsoft had to start doing Patch Tuesday during the Blaster/CodeRed era: https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-details-new-security-pla...

Google actually does this... They tend to announce deprecations in batches.

"There is no way to bulk export your existing user licenses, so you need to have your users help with this part of the migration."

This doesn't even make sense. How are the users supposed to help? I think what google is suggesting here is to build a structure with all the license representations of all your users and then figure out how to enforce your licenses or recharge them or walk them through a process of migration to another licensing system which implies authorizing with their own accounts. At that point it's just easier to assume that all those users will churn. There's a lot of friction for the final users to go through all that process.

Another thing is that once their licensing API is gone there's no way to enforce any license attached to a particular user, so what happens with users that don't go through the migration process that is supposed to be set for this?

I think it would have been easier if they reached out to a couple of payment providers and ask them to write an adapter for their licensing system. That way all the developers could migrate to something else without affecting the users. But I doubt Google is willing to give any business to anyone.

> This doesn't even make sense

Sure it does. It’s a big ‘fuck you’. Imagine if you’ve built a lifestyle business with this.

> How are the users supposed to help?

By going to your site and authorizing it to access their subscription data with their Google login, like you said in the following sentence. That counts as helping, no?

My question was rhetorical. Users can help, but they shouldn't. This is not their responsibility. This is the equivalent of Netflix interrupting my service because I need to help them to migrate their payment provider and they cannot do it if I don't do some manual process.

How many users do you think will bother? No, they'll just complain at some point in the future, probably long after Google has completely turned down the API and migrations are no longer possible.

Imagine this with your GCP infrastructure...

And at some point users will no longer be able to help with it. According to the image on the page, they seem to expect that might be as soon as Q3'21.

"There is no way to bulk export your existing user licenses, so you need to have your users help with this part of the migration."

I don't mind that Google has decided to stop running a payment/subscription/licensing service for web extensions. Even though it's basically just an API to their services that run the Android Play Store (or should be).

But to not provide a way to export the information is pathetic.

This part is mildly technically amusing (to me, at least):

> Exporting user licenses

> - Migrate to another payments processor

> - Migrate your licensing tracking

> ...

> ... You’ll need to use OAuth 2.0 with your users' consent ... . The general sequence is:

> 1. Implement your replacement payment/licensing scheme.

> 2. ...

When I got to (1) I couldn't help but feel like whoever's tasked with dealing with this is going to feel like they've just been asked to go from zero to "now draw the rest of the owl" without even a line sketch to springboard off of.

The bullet points before that are kind of similar as well.

The interesting thing here is that a commercial marketplace for browser extensions failed. That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?!

Is it just that nobody paid for things? Presumably they're going to keep running the chrome web store, so isn't a cut of paymens "free money" to them? Is there some big cost to this I'm not seeing, maybe too much fraud?

I understand shutting down expensive products. It's weird keeping the expensive product running and shutting off the revenue model, no?

My personal sense (not knowing anything internal about the product) is that uptake is extremely low. It also isn't free to run a product that accepts payment. You have to hook it in to a payment processor, handle fraud, handle a different expectation of support, have a bunch of custom code to handle the paid vs. unpaid case. At Google's scale, there's liability to consider, and various compliance and moderation issues that probably don't exist or are much less serious if you're providing the service for free. It's not a zero-overhead proposition.

Continuing the speculation, I'm curious whether that uptake is low in relative or in absolute terms. A small percentage of Google scale is still a big enough business to make a lot of people rich and a lot more comfortably employed.

In a hypothetical world where Google and Alphabet are broken up into a bunch of small companies, would the Extension Store Company be making enough revenue to be viable?

As a counter to this "it's not worth it because of overhead", Google already runs all of this payment/licensing infrastructure to support the Android Play Store, GSuite, GCP etc.

The overhead for the Chrome extension store would be similar but much lower volume than the Android Play store, given that the attack surface (and thus APIs to monitor) are sandboxed by the browser, and the number of extensions is at least an order of magnitude lower than the number of Android apps.

So at "Google scale" this is a rounding error in their payment/licensing space.

> Is it just that nobody paid for things?

Correct. Most people expect Chrome extensions for free.

> That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?!

I bought into the browser extensions heavily when they first became a thing - I was in high-school and would take pride in beefing up my browser with as many utilities as humanly possible. Once the novelty wore off it became apparent that I was using only a couple of them passively, and had absolutely zero need for the rest. Extensions seem neat in theory, but they're mainly useful from removing annoying/harmful behaviour from websites, and monetizing those cases is tricky. People would probably pay for Adblockers, but there's no need.

I dunno ... Google shuts things down independent of revenue metrics as far as I can tell. They seem to set a bar somewhere around "is this the next Gmail" and if the answer is no they shut it down regardless of how profitable it may be. They want a few giant businesses, not a hundred small ones. I wish they would look at spinning these things out because many of them would make entirely viable independent entities even if not exciting to the HN crowd (revenue/expense neutral, but serving a useful place in the world ...).

.. "will this get me promoted or should I work on something new?"

My guess is that Google promotes people based on creating a new service, but not taking over an old service and running it / improving it. So when a manager leaves the organization, their service is orphaned: there is nobody to run it, and nobody to fight for it, so they shut it down. Customers and revenue are more or less irrelevant to this calculation.

It's basically impossible to spin something that has user data out of Google. To my knowledge, it's never happened.

It's because the user data is all protected under googles privacy policies, and you wouldn't be able to migrate that data to a third party without user consent. The process of asking for consent would harm Google's reputation more than the value of the spun out business. The PR damage is less by just shutting down.

Oh, and the actual code of any service is deeply integrated into googles infrastructure. You'd need to do a near full rewrite of many services even to run them in GCP.

Inbox should have met that metric. I think it is a culture thing, it's far more easier to deprecate any product than to keep supporting it

I'm still mad about Inbox. I moved over to it from Gmail because they said that it was going to be the future of Gmail when it launched. Instead, they abandoned it.

How much of Inbox’s features were moved over to Gmail? Will more be moved over? I never used Inbox.

Many of Inbox's features were moved over, such as Snoozing emails, but far from all of the features. I doubt they will move over more — if they had wanted to they would have done it when they shut down Inbox.

The biggest feature I miss from Inbox is the integration of TODOs and emails: you could create editable TODOs in your inbox as easily as composing a new email, and when viewing am email thread, you could create a TODO attached to an email thread (e.g. “review the attached document and reply with my feedback”).

I use Chrome since day 1 and today I learned you can buy extensions, that should give you some perspective.

I _work_ on chrome and today I learned you can buy extensions.

Nobody has ever managed to sell a web browser (Netscape's problem), im not sure why people would buy extensions when they wouldn't be willing to buy a browser.

iCab

The problem today is that nobody can even make a browser. Even Microsoft failed, and was forced to adopt Chromium. The web has become far too complex.

"Forced" is a bit strong. They did the math and realized that being competitive in the browser market was not worth the $$$$ they would have to spend to get there. Given that web browsers aren't really going to make MS money, unless they manage to get full dominance (which isnt really their strategy anymore and would be difficult in modern context), it was probably a smart business decision. If the business calculus was different i am sure they could.

That's how a business gets forced to do something: money.

Google did actively slow and cripple its flagship sites on competing browsers without suffering any consequences. No amount of money will help against that kind of advantage.

I can confirm. We have a normal Google doc (nothing super fancy) that spans about 10 pages at most, and when I scroll past about 8th page in Safari, scrolling becomes almost unusually sluggish and everything starts lagging.

Honestly... I don't know if that's intentional; Drive 'files' get really laggy really quick in Chrome too.

There are a lot of claims [1] that Google makes a ~suspicious number of accidental mistakes~ that harm performance on competing browsers.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

I'm aware. However, Hanlon's razor suggests it's not intentional. Moreover, I think Occam's razor suggests the same: it's a lot simpler if we assume they just primarily test in their own browser (just like I'm sure Mozilla primarily uses Firefox) and just don't care enough to fix any performance deficiencies they do identify based on browser market share / amount they think users will care.

(Keep in mind: I'm not saying Google is doing the right thing and trying to ensure an equal experience across browsers; I'm just saying I don't think they're intentionally trying to make their pages break other browsers)

Don't know, maybe not. It works flawless in mobile Safari, for example. Even though it's not intentional, I'm pretty much sure Google would be more inclined to say "hey use Chrome" instead of fixing it for Safari.

Maybe because mobile Chrome refuses to support extensions for fear of adblock killing the golden goose?

Anecdotally, I could probably get lots of value from some extensions (even free ones) but I generally won't consider installing them because a lot of the ones I could get value from would be able to intercept all data rather than specific sites or during times when I choose to activate them.

I hypothesize that there's a very substantial intersection between the set of users who would benefit from extensions and the set of users who might be concerned about security implications of the current extensions system in Chrome.

I would also be interested to write & monetise extensions except that I anticipate usage may be limited due to the above.

> I would also be interested to write & monetise extensions except that I anticipate usage may be limited due to the above.

For what it's worth you can create a new user profile in Chrome (click your profile picture in the top left then click "add"), and it'll open a new window which is completely isolated from all your regular browsing. It's a decent approach if you want to install a ton of dev extensions.

Also, I run a paid Chrome extension and have good conversion rates from the website -> downloading the free version, so I don't think a lot of users are that bothered by this anyway. People recommend Lastpass, uBlock and Grammarly all the time, which ask for wide permissions.

Average users just don’t “do” extensions. People typically don’t mod their software. I’ve learnt this over the years. Any sort of extension, “power toy” or customization is always going to be a niche, in the great scheme of things.

> Is there some big cost to this I’m not seeing

If I had to guess, I would imagine at some point someone had to revamp the payment backend for the store (because “software is never done” and people have to get promoted somehow), and reimplementing the gateway to extensions was deemed too much of a hassle.

Even many power users don't do extensions. I'm a developer, who is heavily into frontend stuff, and even though I tried many times, I could never get used to using any extension in my life.

I set up a DNS based blocker and that's more than enough. I don't try to hunt 100% of the ads, there's nothing wrong if some of them are displayed as long as the pages aren't fully bloated with them anyway.

A small fraction of people including tech people know you can charge for browser extensions as a one off. I’m still not sure if you can actually. I’ve never seen an integrated payment for an extension. At best something like a SaaS with focus on browser extension.

The amount of profit from this has to be so tiny for Google or any mid cap tech company since no one really knows about it.

I made a comment with some upvoteS here a week or two ago about my hopes that the new Safari could maybe usher in an era of browser extensions being seen more as apps than current status quo but without the ridiculous high priced recurring prices being added more and more.

IE paying $1+ one time, or $1-3/mo, or $10-25/year being a not uncommon situation would be great in my opinion. Both stamp out the rampant data mining extensions do, legitimize extensions more, and hopefully get some indie developers paid.

The marketplace did not fail. The Chrome Web Store lives on - it's just the PAYMENT section of it that fails. All the extensions will still exist and be available for download, we devs just can't use Google's payment or subscription service anymore.

So if a dev has thousands subscribers paying monthly through Google's system, they will all have to sign up again with a new payment processor - there is no way to migrate the payment info, only the license info.

And yes Google takes a cut each month so it's hard to imagine why they have decided to forgo these millions of dollars and at the same time hurt extension devs - because I can imagine a very large number of people deciding not to resubscribe :(

Are they still going to call it a "Store" when you can't buy anything on it?

I always thought it was weird that my free extensions were distributed by a store. Expect Google to launch a new service with the same functionality and then deprecate the Chrome Web Store.

I love that this "deprecation timeline" includes March 27 where this forgotten about payment API randomly broke.

The cynic in me thinks that might have been them doing a "Scream test" - break something, see if anyone notices (enough), if not, continue with getting rid of it. If it causes a stir, pretend it was just a once off issue.

"Broke" is an overstatement. The post says they only disabled using the API to sell new paid extensions or in-app items. Existing extensions were not affected, except extensions that added brand-new features since March and wanted to charge users separately for them.

I think people are missing that you can still charge for extension, just not with Google's payment system. Anyway, called this well over a year ago - whenever anyone asked for tips on how to integrate Chrome payments into their extension I would strongly recommend against it.

If you read the Chrome extension developers forums, you would have seen frequent posts about the payment system breaking, plus it was lacking lots of features like discount codes, letting you change subscription prices, being able to share purchases with Firefox (I wouldn't expect this from Google but it's a big negative) and letting you export user emails. It was clear Google wasn't interested in supporting the payments feature for a while. They've let it sit broken since the COVID lockdowns started which is completely insane (with unfortunate developers in the forums asking when it'll be fixed so they can integrate payments as if they think it's a one-off).

For what it's worth, I use Paddle + Firebase for a website SEO auditor extension I run (https://www.checkbot.io/) and it works well, where Paddle addresses all of the downsides above.

If anyone wants any tips on setting up something similar, feel free to message me. I know a lot of people recommend Stripe, but Paddle takes care of country specific tax and VAT for you which is a big plus for reduced admin.

My extension was originally meant to be a Chrome App but they deprecated those before I launched haha.

Hi I wrote you to sw@seanw.org from fattynoparents@gmail.com, could you please help me? Thanks.

This sucks. I paid $25 for my play console account to monetize my extension two days ago - just to find out they deprecate web store payments entirely.

I think they should do prorated refunds.

Make up a support e-mail address at random, send refund request to it, wait 14 days, file chargeback, be sure to mention no response to refund request which is attached to the form. Don't worry, they probably don't pay attention to chargebacks either

Alternatively, simply wait 12-18 months and the same feature will be relaunched under a slightly different name by a different team

According to everything i read about chargebacks on Google services, they indeed don’t pay attention, they just automatically block access to any of your Google accounts and services shortly after you do a chargeback. And given the horror stories I’ve heard about trying to resolve or reverse any automated account bans by Google, I do not recommend following that route.

Yup, companies dislike charge backs and many will block you from all their services for requesting one. So don't go that route unless you never wish to use services from that company again. My wife accidentally did one for a mmorpg she plays and after 6 weeks (and dealing with support, multiple banks, etc.) it was only social media shaming that got them to unban her.

A company can pay more than $100 for a $1 chargeback, regardless of the outcome, and if your amount of chargebacks exceeds certain threshold, a payment processor may just dump you entirely, so it is very understandable, why 'companies hate chargebacks'.

Stripe is a processor with more generous chargeback terms than many out there, but merchants with small payments still suffer from them very much.

When I did support for a newly-launched MMO back in 2014, the policy for a chargeback was to permanently disable any using the card, and ban any cards used on those accounts.

There’s been a couple of casual stuff Here and there on how no one will chargeback Amazon (or Walmart depending on demographic). Not worth the risk compared to dependency. I agree myself and ate a $125 loss from Amazon recently when it didn’t feel worth the trouble. But I’m almost any other circumstance, I would’ve charged back. I used an AMEX for the purchase too.

Similarly, until I weaned myself off using Amazon for majority of shopping, I had minor anxiety over other Amazon stuff. Like my return rate and I had 2 incidents of being sent junk instead of the couple hundred dollar electronic. I’m sure they log how often it happens to a customer and it’s possible to not be stealing but still get booted if it happens too much.

I have no connection to any of the teams involved, but if you have problems getting this resolved, please send me a mail (my HN name @google.com) and I'll make it right.

Hi, I'm in the same boat. Do you mind if I write you too please? Thanks.

Sure thing. Same address.

And if it turns out that there's a pattern of a _lot_ of developers who all recently signed up for first-time Google Play Developer accounts just to monetize Chrome apps, I'd be maybe a little surprised, but more than happy to have helped identify an unexpected trend.

If I'm understanding the timeline correctly, it's not just recent signups but anybody who has wanted to monetize an extension from March until now, who paid under the expectation that the temporary ban would be lifted.

Thanks! Mostly I just hated to think that a developer might fall into protracted customer support discussion asking for their account to be refunded, if the $25 turns out to be a hardship. I wouldn't expect this to impact many people, but you never know.

I'd also be curious what happens if people ask the normal channels for the refund, of course.

Do a chargeback through the card/bank, they'll have a webform for you to submit it somewhere for contested charges.

They'll ask for proof, just put you paid for a service that will no longer exist and include screenshots of the deprecation page.

Has anyone tried this with Google though? Is there a chance it can result in a locked account? And what would recovery be like?

Yes. Your account is banned. Beg for forgiveness.

Don't do this if you use any other google services on the same account (gmail, drive), there is a good chance your account will get banned

You can still integrate another payment system though, just not Google's one.

I feel like we are getting nearly weekly examples of "the platform store will eventually kill your business". These platform stores wouldn't be anywhere without independent developers building the software to sell in then, and these big companies just shit on them.

It’s so weird when you think about it. Does Valve and Steam sit there and wait for a successful game, copy it, stamp out competition, see if it works and decide to continue or not?

Google represents one type of software thankfully, web. It’s craziness at the end of the day. Examining this behavior takes you into the pathological where no other being exists, Thanos incarnate.

https://voicesofvr.com/937-facebooks-desire-to-own-the-metav...

https://voicesofvr.com/944-guy-godin-on-getting-cloned-by-fa...

From the email: "When we launched the Chrome Web Store 11 years ago, there weren't a lot of ways for our developers to take payment from users. Today, there is a thriving ecosystem of payment providers offering a far more diverse set of features than a single provider could hope to. Now that our developers have so many great options to choose from, we can comfortably sunset our own payments integration."

My takeaway: Google products & services exist to fill a gap until there's sufficient other options. As options increase, expect Google to "comfortably sunset" their solutions.

>> As options increase, expect Google to "comfortably sunset" their solutions.

Read some of the other comments here. This is anything other than “comfortably” and will create a lot of pain & churn for Both the devs and users

Exactly my point. Those are, however, the words Google used in the email they sent out about this.

Why did you quote comfortably sunset? Are you indicating that this is anything but that? It isn’t clear.

I'm not personally impacted by this one, but I've been impacted by a very similar deprecation (Google Wallet for Digital Goods) by Google. Can assure you that anyone impacted by this deprecation isn't feeling comfortable about it.

Haha, this is so ridiculous and completely on-brand for Google at this point. I've run a Google Music extension for a few years now and would have absolutely no migration path since I don't have a backend -- but it doesn't matter since they're shutting down Google Music anyway!

A related fun fact: accounting data exports for extensions have been broken for me (and I think all extension merchants?) since April 2018. I had to get the NY attorney general to write them a letter before they would actually respond to my support requests so that I could properly file my taxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20588493. I'm sure that will be fun this year!

How does one get the attorney general to write a letter like this?

On a recommendation from a friend I filed a complaint online at https://ag.ny.gov/internet/online-forms. I wrote up the situation and attached a pdf copy of the support interaction I'd had with Google.

It wasn't quick, but it did seem to work. Here's the timeline:

- May 2018: I contact Google about being unable to export my accounting data from last month

- November 2018: after nothing but "thank you for your patience" emails, I complain to the AG

- early February 2019: I get a letter in the mail from the AG saying they'd forwarded the complaint to Google

- late February 2019: Google finally gives me my data [edit: I'd had April originally, but that was a separate request].

Sorry if this is obvious, but if I may ask, how did you file your taxes in the meantime, given that this took a full year?

I noticed the issue in May 2018, so getting my data in February was just in time for 2019 reporting (I had mixed up the timestamps when I originally wrote I got the data in April).

Depends on the state, but look for verbiage related to lodging a consumer complaint. Here's[1] the one for my state.

The AG office isn't necessarily writing a personalized letter, but rather forwarding your complaint and maintaining visibility into the correspondence until it's resolved.

In this case, a complaint such as "Google operates a marketplace for web browser extensions. I generate revenue through this marketplace, and have been unable to obtain the transaction records for sales made through Google's marketplace that are necessary to comply with my NY State tax obligations. Please see attached for correspondence records of my unsuccessful attempts to resolve this situation to date."

AG's office forwards that to Google's legal team, asks for a response. Technically the AG's office doesn't care how the situation gets resolved, and they're just acting to facilitate the complaint and not as your personal lawyer. But in this situation a resolution/response of "oh yea, no we can't give you those our export button is broke" _would_ be of interest to the AGs office, since it potentially means there are many NY state residents unable to comply with their tax obligations and it becomes an actual issue on their radar to look into. So instead their legal team will track down whoever the hell is responsible/capable of providing those records, hand them over with a smile, get the matter closed with the AG's office, and give you a direct point of contact for the future, so Big Brother AG doesn't have to get involved (or see) future correspondence on the matter.

Actual responses will vary depending on the complaint. But issues that are likely to impact more than just you are likely to be taken the most seriously by the company receiving the complaint, since those are the ones that could be issues the AG decides to look into "on behalf of the State" and can lead to enforcement actions/fines/etc.

[1] https://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/working-for-tennessee/fil...

I generally find the only way anyone gets Google to respond to any service issue at this point is to be lucky enough that they can make it in to a tax issue so Google legal get involved or to utter (at least vaguely credibly) the magic word antitrust.

Otherwise Google effectively just bin any issues that a customer service team should fix.

Or get your issue visible on social media

I make a living by selling Chrome Extension. This one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tradingview-alerts...

And I'm pissed.

Me too

Don't. Just don't. Ever. Rely. On Google. For Anything.

Who says Google is destroying competition, they encourage competition by closing down their own stuff people love and use.

That is destroying competition though. What Google does is enter a market which previously had a healthy economy of paid software, snuff out all the other players with a free version, and then abandon the space when they get bored. And the old economy can never come back, because there's hysteresis involved in the relative costs of starting from scratch versus keeping a functioning ecosystem alive, and because users now expect the software to be free and throw a fit if they're charged for it (especially if it's an ongoing cost, because god forbid developers can't live off a single payment for the rest of their lives)

It's only gradually becoming common knowledge, but eventually we're going to collectively realize that Google killed small ISVs, and at the time we all cheered them on.

Reminds me of the Google Reader saga: it took over from dedicated RSS readers due to convenience and experience, but when it was killed, the RSS ecosystem never fully bounced back.

There was never a healthy economy of paid browser extensions, neither before nor after Google's entry into the space.

Maybe not paid browser extensions, but firefox had an amazing library of extensions and Chrome stole their thunder. Of course then Ff shot themselves in the foot by deprecating XUL and requiring developers rewrite their scripts, but with everyone on Chrome, very few people did.

What "healthy economy of paid software" previously existed here? The only other site for browser extensions I'm aware of which predated the Chrome Web Store was addons.mozilla.org, and that never supported paid extensions at all.

Whatever you would use a browser extension to do now, there was probably a standalone application to do the same thing before.

The original vision of the web didn't just have "sites with servers" and "consumers with browsers", but rather tons of potential independent "User-Agents" that would perform tasks on behalf of people. The consolidation of the web into just browsers, and subsequent flipflopping between creation and destruction (similar to the EEE cycle MS has employed), has killed whatever of that vision might have flourished.

The last browser extension i used that was basically an app was chatzilla for firefox, and that was a long time ago. I can't even think of an extension that would make sense as an independent app, let alone one i would pay for.

People pay for 2fa and password management. Granted the model of payment for those is usually shifted, but there could have been a sold product on the store. I would pay for the Adblockers I use, but just donate instead (when possible.) I could see a lot of b2b companies selling their extensions.

Edit: I have maybe 20 extensions installed in general. Everything to killing websites ability to affect my ability to copy/paste to transcoders.

> Whatever you would use a browser extension to do now, there was probably a standalone application to do the same thing before.

I don't buy that argument. While I can't speak for all users, most of the extensions I use are ones which modify the behavior of the web browser or of specific web pages. They wouldn't have any meaning outside the context of a web browser.

Maybe paid extensions represented part of a different ecosystem? If so, though, it's one I never really encountered a need for.

I think for a while, Google sort of hoped to turn Chrome extensions into something like actual apps. They seemed to support stuff like making desktop icons for them, opening them in windows that seemed to be independent from Chrome, making them the only way to make something that seemed like a real app on Chromebooks, etc. With all of that in place, it seems to make sense to let people pay charge/pay for them. Then I guess they just kind of got tired of it, as Google tends to do, and started dropping various parts of that system.

Probably the only reason they bothered to post a notice and write a really lame migration plan is that a decent number of developers were making money from it and would pitch a fit if it just disappeared.

Google apps (for Chrome?) were somewhat separate but under one store, they just got Android apps working on chromebooks, deprecated it and now this. It's just a push towards Android ecosystem where they make more money.

It's the "desert of profitability" strategy [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17048329

This is a VERY quick deprecation period... wow. And I wonder how many people have developed something during Covid, in anticipation of Google turning back on "new paid items", and now can never use that effort.

Moreover, it sounds like they're saying there will be no solution for having the user purchase an app prior to downloading the app - all purchase flows will have to be in-app? This sounds like it will make for terrible UX, with apps not disclosing (or people not noticing) that they have no free features until after you've downloaded them....

Google Deprecation is the only Google service out lives Google Search.

Makes sense: when life will end, Death will still be there.

Surely death dies with life? Once there's no life, there can be no more death.

It very much depends on how you define Death - if it's "the absence of life", then it will stick around. Still, even if you go for "the termination of life", it will out-exist Life by an instant more.

(For the record, I'm just parroting Neil Gaiman's excellent work on the Sandman saga...)

Yep. I remember paying for the license to publish a joke extension I've made for chrome. Now I won't be able to make my money back, haha.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crosstext/gnlobfhf...

fun fact: this won't work on facebook anymore. I made this so I can write bad jokes on my Facebook, after the third one, facebook wrote a script that undo what my script does. So I wrote a patch to disable facebook script first. The Facebook wrote another script that undo what my script does, again. Then I just gave up. I was a super poor student back then, no point in engaging in such nonsense.

I probably have the video showing this back and forth between me and facebook, if probably posted on my now deactivated facebook

I might be misunderstanding. Why would FB do anything about something you or any other single person is doing?

Well, you tell me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsKz1py7co

Thanks! That’s pretty cool

Google sent an email to all Chrome Web Store app developers about this... Despite only a tiny fraction having ever used the payment system.

Was that just carelessness? Why not only notify users of the feature you are about to deprecate? Do they not have records of which app developers have used the payments API?

Thanks for letting us know about the email, Gmail marked it as "unimportant" so I wasn't notified.

How weird, I was just thinking about this today. I've had an optional "Buy for $0.99" button next to the three Chrome extensions I made back in 2016. It's brought in around $1.50 per month from the US, Australia, Japan, Russia, Ireland, South Africa, a ton of different countries. I'm not sure why people have been buying it but it always made me feel good to see that some little thing I made was liked by someone incredibly far away.

Am I understanding it correctly that products paid for will stop working at the undecided "some future time"? And at that point there will be no official way to keep those extensions/apps working even if both the dev and the user wants to?

go with apple, get App store serfdom. Go with google, you get smoother sailing until one day they cancel the sea. Moral of the story is dont build long term on these platforms. Use them as an onramp and get out. The web is still our most open precious platform. TBL never banned anyone

There's a quote that describes this so well I keep reposting it on occasions like such, ever since Twitter pulled one of their platform betrayals back in 2012/13:

"Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."

-- Sovereign, Mass Effect

"Rudimentary creatures of blood, and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding."

-- Mark Zuckerberg

That definitely sounds better than "They "trust me". Dumb fucks."

Just my luck...

I created my extension and started monetizing it March of this year...

See the other thread where a Google employee offers to make it right.

I appreciate that he had sympathy, but I think max he can do is refund $25. I think that that amount is the least of concern to the most developers.

yeah, I've made my money back so I'm not as concerned about the $25, but there goes any chance of growing the revenue in any meaningful way.

I am getting a kick out of all the people here saying that "no one pays for extensions". I've consistently made $50-100 from mine with no marketing whatsoever.

$100 total? Doesn’t sound like a lot unless you worked on it for a day.

Sorry, no monthly.

Did you have to do much support?

I get an occasional request for new features maybe once a month. If I can add them in a few minutes I do, otherwise I tell them it isn't supported and won't be. So basically, no.

That relative small amount is cool for your efforts, but is just one example

I reckon most people who wrote extensions would be happy for Google to keep the $25 and instead refund the time they spent writing the extension.

Just as expected! Does anyone know any good alternatives to handle payments and licensing, preferably something which doesn't require any upfront fee? Currently I'm using Gumroad for an extension I run (https://codegena.com/WAXP) but would love to know other options.

Confirming over and over: https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-depre...

https://killedbygoogle.com/ This is my favorite site tracking stuff like this.

Too bad the site is just whitepage without javascript.

I'm sure they'd appreciate your pull request to fix that: https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle

Wh- why is that a bad thing? What about it would be made better by JS?

It's just a document, html is the reasonable choice for things like that.

If you want to PR and then maintain 200 html list item components by hand, you’re more than welcome to join as a co-maintainer. :)

I'm guessing it's using static hosting so server side rendering is out of the question, but if you wanted to make it work without JavaScript a static site generator could be used to avoid having to maintain 200 list items manually.

I was being facetious. I know what SSG is.

Wouldn’t a static site generator take care of that? Not being snarky just asking.

Yes. It would. I was joking. I don’t feel the need to implement it. This project (outside of data) hasn’t really been updated since it launched. Someone tried to force TypeScript upon it, but I’m a big fan of “don’t overkill it.” At the time, SSG was (and is) overkill for my stupid, single page weekender.

Oops. I misunderstood. I was really confused by this whole thread until I went back and looked at the page source and realized the person I replied to meant that with JS turned off, the page is blank.

The problem is they just start way way too many things. Almost everything on that list I have never heard of and probably had very few users. Most other web companies are careful about starting a new service or adding a new feature because it means committing to supporting it for a long time. Google just starts 1 billion projects a year and kills everything that isn't a smash hit meaning you can't depend on anything they release.

Although about 70% of this list was rightfully killed. Stuff like youtube for 3ds and then it includes things that were simply renamed or updated.

Google doesn't only kill unpopular things. If it did, you can depend on those things that have already become popular by not being an early adopter, which then becomes a chicken-and-egg problem that at least provides some strategic level of negative feedback to Google.

I started seeing it again after a long time, felt sad at the products I missed, felt at the products they discontinued after a really long time, and then I realized that some of these products were superseded by other products that were nearly similar OR they were merged into bigger products.

I wish the site would say as much.

OK, trying my hardest to view this deprecation in a positive light: The 5% commission was already minimal but by removing payments altogether, Google proves it has no interest in monetizing Chrome extensions as a platform.

It's a real shame they didn't offer to parcel this off into a company in its own right that could be owned and managed by its users, as a stay of execution. I'm sure some would prefer that.

The deprecation route Google takes destroy enormous amounts of value.

I remember when I had Google Checkout as my only payment platform. My condolences to all the developers who will now be blowing 1-3 weeks just to get back where they were.

Does the Edge store still allow paid extensions?

Somehow I have feeling google is loosing ground. Are there any figures which can support my assumption?

Google is so protective about Chrome and Search they're scared about getting drawn into an Apple like Epic problem with antitrust consequences.

They're already drawn in. Epic sued Google too. But Epic doesn't have a Chrome extension, and Google Play Store payments aren't similarly deprecated.

Google isn't really like Apple in the monopolistic sense. You're free to install your own app store on a Gphone.

Chrome extensions are a bit different because they have to be signed with another store by Google anyway.

Technically, you can sideload Chrome extensions with Developer mode, so I don't think that's much different from Android.

The difference is that on Android you can get a different store, and the only thing you have to do is turn on dev mode and then download/run the apk.

There seems to be a lot more friction to sideloading a Chrome extension: download, unzip, turn on dev mode, click a button & navigate to the unzipped files...

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