Boosting developer success on Google Play
Helping developers build sustainable businesses is a core part of Google Play’s mission. We work with partners every day to understand the challenges they face and help them bring their innovative ideas to life. Getting a new app off the ground and into orbit is not easy! To aid their quest for growth we provide a broad range of support, from powerful marketing tools and actionable data in the Play Console, education via Play Academy, best practices and thought leadership resources, programs such as the Indie Games Festival, Indie Corner, and accelerator programs around the world. We’re always looking for new ways to give their growth a boost.
Today we are announcing a significant change for those developers that sell in-app digital goods and services on Play (e.g. gems in a game). Starting on 1st July, 2021 we are reducing the service fee Google Play receives 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.
While these investments are most critical when developers are in the earlier stages of growth, scaling an app doesn’t stop once a partner has reached $1M in revenue -- we’ve heard from our partners making $2M, $5M and even $10M a year that their services are still on a path to self-sustaining orbit. This is why we are making this reduced fee on the first $1M of total revenue earned each year available to every Play developer that uses the Play billing system, regardless of size. We believe this is a fair approach that aligns with Google’s broader mission to help all developers succeed. Once developers confirm some basic information to help us understand any associated accounts they have and ensure we apply the 15% properly, this discount will automatically renew each year. We look forward to sharing full details in the coming months.
Last year when we clarified the requirements of Google Play’s Payments policy, we explained that the service fee for Google Play is only applicable to developers who offer in-app sale of digital goods and services. More than 97% of apps globally do not sell digital goods, and therefore do not pay any service fee. For the developers in India that do sell digital goods, but have not yet integrated with Play’s billing system, they continue to have until 31st March, 2022 as announced previously. For the thousands of developers in India that are already using Play to sell digital goods, they can start receiving the benefit of this change as soon as it goes into effect in July.
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. We look forward to seeing more businesses scale to new heights on Android, and to further discussions with the Indian developer community to find new ways to support them technically and economically as they build their businesses.
