Google follows Apple’s lead, letting developers keep more of their Play Store earnings

Following in the footsteps of Apple, Google has announced today that starting July 1st, 2021, fees for leveraging paid apps or IAPs (in-app purchases) will essentially be cut in half for 99% of developers in the Play Store. As it stands right now, all developers making money via the Play Store pay 30% to Google for the right to be in the Play Store. Whether you think that is crazy-high or a justifiable price to be a the fingertips of over one billion users is debatable, but the fact that Google is following Apple in drastically lowering these fees is a good thing all around.

The cut to 15% of all earnings does have yearly limits, however, and only the first $1 million in earnings will get this break per developer per year. Once you make more, you go back to the 30% fee structure. According to Google:

Starting on July 1, 2021 we are reducing the service fee Google Play receives when a developer sells digital goods or services to 15% for the first $1M (USD) of revenue every developer earns each year. With this change, 99% of developers globally that sell digital goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees. These are funds that can help developers scale up at a critical phase of their growth by hiring more engineers, adding to their marketing staff, increasing server capacity, and more.

With this in place, even developers making large amounts of money will still benefit from that first million in earnings. Ultimately, however, this move does more to help out smaller developers that are south of that million dollar earning mark each year. Google says that is 99% of the global developer pool, so this is a pretty big deal. In a world where Google and Apple both want to continue incentivizing app development and growth, allowing developers to keep more of their earnings to re-invest in new ideas and infrastructure is a very good thing.

As a platform we do not succeed unless our partners succeed. Android and Google Play have always listened to our developer partners from around the world and we continue to take their input into account as we build and run the ecosystem.

How true this quote is, we can’t say. Yes, Google is correct in identifying the fact that they don’t succeed without good developer relations. Whether they made this change as a result of listening to the developer community or just as a knee-jerk reaction to Apple’s move is anyone’s guess. Either way, this means most developers will make out a bit better year over year and maybe, just maybe, some of that money can go towards making apps better on Chromebooks, too.

VIA: 9to5 Google