Google announced Tuesday (March 16) it will offer a substantial reduction in service fees to developers using its app store, a move that will benefit 99 percent of the creators using its platform.
Beginning July 1, Google will lower the service fee Google Play receives when a developer sells their goods or services to 15 percent for the first $1 million in revenue that developer earns every year.
“With this change, 99 percent of developers globally that sell digital goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees,” Google VP of Product Management Sameer Samat said on Google’s Android blog. “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.”
The fee reduction is open to all developers, no matter their size or yearly revenue.
“As a platform we do not succeed unless our partners succeed,” Samat wrote. “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.”
Google’s announcement follows a similar move by Apple in late 2020, in which the company launched a program that allowed developers earning less than $1 million post-commission in yearly revenue to participate in a small business program that cut App Store commission rates in half, from 30 percent to 15 percent.
The rate cut applies to all paid app revenue and in-app purchases. Apple estimated that a bulk of the 28 million registered app makers would qualify for the program.
Apple’s 30 percent commission rule has been criticized by a consortium of news publishers — including The New York Times, Washington Post, ESPN and Bloomberg — and game developers, operating under the banner of the “Coalition for App Fairness” and protesting what they called the “Apple tax.”
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