Google Play to reduce service fee for developers potentially giving big boost to India’s ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ vision

Google Play Store: Following the footsteps of Apple, Google has now decided to slash its service fee for developers on their first $1 million by half. The company, in a blog post, said that the move would help developers in building sustainable businesses. As per the announcement, starting from July 1 this year, the tech giant would reduce the service fee it charges from developers from 30% to 15% for the first $1 million or around Rs 7.25 crore of revenue that a developer earns in a year. This would impact 99% of the global developers selling their services on Google Play Store, the company said.

The company added that the reduced fee would be applicable to all developers on Play Store that use the Play billing system, irrespective of the size of their revenues. This is in contrast to the announcement made by Apple, which said that it would be reducing its service fees from 30% to 15% only for those developers who earned $1 million or less from the App Store sales proceeds in a year.

Notably, Google had last year clarified that its service fee is only applicable to those developers who sell digital goods on their apps, like gems in a game for which a user needs to pay. Developers who do not sell any such digital goods are not charged any service fee, and such apps account for over 97% of the total apps on the Play Store.

App developers in India are also set to benefit from this initiative. However, for that, all developers in India who sell digital goods would need to integrate with the Play billing system, which they can do by March 31, 2022, without which this discount would not be available.

The move would benefit Indian developers greatly, who have increasingly begun to venture into the field of developing apps, especially since the Government of India banned numerous Chinese apps. With the increasing emphasis on Atmanirbhar Bharat, several developers across the country have come up with apps that would serve as replacements for the Chinese apps that were banned.

Not only that, but with increasing concerns regarding privacy concerns, developers in India have also made apps that would provide alternatives to social media platforms like Twitter, and with this incentive of Google (and Apple, which had been announced a similar incentive in November 2020), these apps would be able to invest more in proper development of the app which would help them build steady, sustainable businesses.