Google reached an agreement with US developers that will let consumers subscribe to services outside the company\u2019s Play Store, marking the latest shift for an app-store economy that it dominates alongside Apple Inc.<\/p>\n
The Alphabet Inc. division also plans to provide $90 million to support developers who earned $2 million or less annually through the company\u2019s app store from 2016 to 2021.<\/p>\n
Google will continue to charge a 15% fee on the first $1 million in annual revenue earned from the Play Store by US developers, the company said Thursday in a statement.<\/p>\n
The pact mirrors\u00a0a settlement<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0made by Apple last year with small developers, who had pushed for changes to how app stores work.<\/p>\n As with the Google settlement, Apple developers were allowed to advertise lower pricing outside of its App Store directly to consumers via email or other communications.<\/p>\n Apple also agreed to support developers using a pool of $100 million \u2014 a slightly larger amount than Google is offering.<\/p>\n Due to a separate settlement with the Japanese Fair Trade Commission, Apple also now allows third-party subscription services to bill customers outside of the App Store, bypassing the tech giant\u2019s 15%-to-30% fee.<\/p>\n Both companies have faced intense legal and polical scrutiny over the commissions and\u00a0billing restrictions<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0that are applied to paid services in their app stores.<\/p>\n Congress is weighing a bill to force the tech companies to change their software business models. Last July, three dozen states sued Google in part over its app-store policies.<\/p>\n Match Group Inc., which runs dating services such as Tinder, sued Google in May over its Play Store policies, saying the search giant was acting as a monopolist with its billing rules.<\/p>\n Within weeks, Match said Google had made changes to the policies, spurring the dating site to withdraw its legal effort to gain a temporary restraining order.<\/p>\n Google also\u00a0announced<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0in March that it would begin a test to let some apps bill users directly as an alternative to paying through Google.<\/p>\n Read more: Match says Google is making concessions on app-store payments<\/p>\n In the deal announced Thursday, Google said it was revising its policies to let developers contact customers outside the Play Store, including \u201cabout subscription offers or lower-cost offerings on a rival app store or the developer\u2019s website.\u201d<\/p>\n The Mountain View, California-based company also said it would publish annual transparency reports about activity on its app store, including statistics such as apps removed and account terminations.<\/p>\n Apple, located in Cupertino, California, has agreed to publish similar annual transparency reports about app removals.<\/p>\n Google reached an agreement with US developers that will let consumers subscribe to services outside the company\u2019s Play Store, marking the latest shift for an app-store economy that it dominates alongside Apple Inc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":419936,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[79472,16432,9127,167,45108],"class_list":["post-450948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","tag-app-developers","tag-app-development","tag-app-stores","tag-google","tag-play-store"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450948"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read: Snapchat premium subscription service arrives this week<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"