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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Why is the title inaccurate / different to the article?

"Google requiring Android apps on the Play Store"

Requiring all android apps (eg: from third party app stores, built in apps shipped with phones or from vendors) as implied by the HN title would be a huge leap and have a lot of implications. But this is not that. I'm very surprised though by this statement from their post about it:

> Less than 3% of developers with apps on Play sold digital goods over the last 12 months

That seems astonishingly low - while I understand the Play Store is very ad driven, I had thought IAP was still a decent component of monetization. From this it sounds like the Play Store is a bit of an advertising wasteland ... or am I misunderstanding?

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> Less than 3% of developers with apps on Play sold digital goods over the last 12 months

That sounds like a cherry-picked number to downplay the change but:

1) That's 90,000 apps

2) The amount of revenue those apps (like Spotify and Netflix) generate is probably in the 10s or 100s of millions

I'd bet that some of the largest revenue apps are the ones using their own billing -- the devs who make low-revenue apps probably don't want to spend the time or money to set all that up.

For small indie devs who's products run on multiple platforms, supporting each platforms native IAP system is a nightmare.

if you're a small indie dev supporting multiple platform you're a unicorn. i don't think this is a common usecase. most devs tend to focus on apple initially and then make an android app if they blow up.

No doubt you start with one, but if you hit on any real vein of success you'll build for other platforms too if it makes sense to. There's no way this is "unicorn" rare. I've done it, and so have my competitors within a short time frame. All are bootstrapped.

Or given that Apple only has 20% world wide, and the local market happens to be almost exclusively Android, a couple of other smartphones and feature phones, focus on Android first, and iOS only if it ever goes global.

If you want to reach people - yes. If you want to make money - Apple’s 20% greatly outspend Android’s users, so you should start there, to verify your product.

It is hard to make money with iOS if no one in the country owns Apple devices (note "local market"), if you managed to do such feat please let us know.

No one is a bit drastic, don't you think?

It is called real world, there are plenty of countries with zero Apple devices, and if they happen to be available, only a couple of government level people have them, completely irrelevant for the companies selling their goods to the local population, the market that they actually get their money from.

So if you have a formula how the e.g. train service gets money from a selling tickets app for iOS in a country with zero iPhone presence, you have our attention.

https://deviceatlas.com/sites/deviceatlas.com/files/images/m...

Not in the market I operate in.

I don't think that is too much of a worry.

Just like authentication, there will be abstraction libraries that take care of it soon enough, or somebody like stripe will build a SDK and do some consolidated billing management for you.

As someone in these shoes, coming from experience, it is a pain. Where it could just be stripe/whatever single payment system you choose, it now has to be an abstraction at best. The abstractions aren't perfect--they limit you to only using the common features across all payment systems you have to support. It absolutely creates a poor user experience for customers.

Want to prorate upgrades? Well google play doesn't offer that. Want to allow switching from monthly to annually? Does Apple offer that? Want to issue a partial refund? Want to credit an account? Etc.

It goes further, a customer emails and asks "how do I cancel?". Instead of having easy instructions for them, it's now a switch block for all the different IAP solutions. If that customer forgets how they signed up, now they need to dig through all the IAP steps for cancelling.

And it's not just Google Play and Apple. There's web, Windows store, amazon app store, android, ios, chrome payments (deprecated), something for linux, etc.

While revenuecat seems decent for Google/Apple, it doesn't touch any of the others.

I'm not saying it's not possible. All I'm saying is it's a whole lot of extra work just to allow the largest companies in the world to scalp 30% from an indie dev, and force a poor experience down users throats.

it is going to be rough around the edges. Platform pain is already there, react native is a solution to a similar problem. It is no means perfect, you cannot avoid knowing the underlying platform kinks and library limitations

Abstractions are not excuse for the underlying payment grab both the vendors are forcing on the devs. Just saying such problems and abstractions are not new and indie devs will get some relief with an abstraction

Having built a cross-platform app recently as a very small team, I want to put in a plug for RevenueCat (https://www.revenuecat.com/). They abstract away the differences between the Apple/Google APIs so you don't have to worry about dealing with both. You only interface with Revcat. They don't support every last Play Store/App Store API, but I haven't yet found that be an issue. Worth noting that our app uses subscriptions, though, so I don't really know how they do with regular old purchases (I would assume that's supported since it seems to be a simpler case).

Thanks for this. I might just do that.

Another vouch for RevenueCat, has worked a charm for my project. Saved me a lot of time from not having to learn all the intricacies of both payment system backends.

More than 90% of devs ship an app with no-to few downloads. Just the top 1000 apps are probably 99% of all profits on the play store.

"That seems astonishingly low"

I imagine there are a ton of garbage apps that were created automatically for spam, seo, whatever reasons.

Reminds me of this brilliant GDC Talk - 1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8Lhqri8tZk

Maybe, but I know many people that release free Android apps.

I've done it too.

I think Android App development culture is extremely different than iOS Development.

Ok, we've added the store to the title above.

>> Less than 3% of developers with apps on Play sold digital goods over the last 12 months

> That seems astonishingly low [...]

That depends. I would not be surprised if there were an order of magnitude more "developers with apps on the Play Store" than on the iOS store, simply because of the lower barrier to entry ($$ and lock in patterns pushed by Apple makes it harder to get started on iOS). So would that mean 3% is actually astonishingly high?

Isn't it obvious that this would only apply to apps distributed through the Play Store, though? How else would Google be able enforce it?

It's not at all obvious based on the title. Many people don't know about sideloading.

Side loading is incredibly rare as a phenomenon.

The important part of this discussion is not on the user side. Yeah they can sideload but really they won't do that because of IAP, of all things.

The important part of this discussion is on the developer side. Going through Google will mean they get to shape what apps developers can even economically build without falling back to sideloading (which just won't happen, see above) and we already see how "great" that in the iOS ecosystem.

Of course, you are in camp "IAP means clear and central subscription management, it's great for me!" then you might not care or even welcome this.

I happen to be in camp "What is good for the user should not be contingent on the business model allowing for a 30% cut going to google." There are and will be products/services users want, but not at 1.30 times the price, and those will simply become impossible now.

On the other hand... Let's just watch Rome burn and then see what we do with the ashes?

Wow yeah that is a very crucial bit of information to leave out of the title.

I wonder if they'll ban PayPal, Facebook Pay, WeChat, AliPay, Western Union, and all the rest of the lot?

Each will have to negociate special terms with Google to continue operating.

what percentage of user installed android apps in the wild come from somewhere other than the play store? Is it high?

Thanks to China yes, they have their own ecosystem.

Yeah china is different.

Instead of play store, "Default app store" to cover what ever comes with chinese phones.

Or, US and Europe, what percentage...?

Because there isn't a single unified store (vendors have their own), it's extremely common for Chinese websites to have a link on their homepage/in their header to an apk file that can self-update.

Lots of apps just get ripped off the android ecosystem and put on the chinese ecosystem if they're good enough.

I don't know reliable numbers for this and I'm not sure they exist. Would love to hear though!

But just take stock of your surroundings. Think of everyone you know, and think who of them sideload apps on a regular basis. Now correct for the tech-affinity of your social surroundings (probably high if you hang out on HN...)

For me, only the most hard-core of my friends sideload at all. Everyone else goes with stock apps. So sideloading should be in the regime of "count the zeros before the first non-zero mantissa digit."

I don't live in anything remotely close to a tech bubble and nearly everyone I know with an Android has sideloaded apps at least once, including my parents.

Don't confuse the US experience for the global one.

It's in the single digits or even lower. None of my non-tech friends know such a thing exists.

Do note that google engaged in anti-competitive practices to discourage other stores emerging.

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