One of the highlights of the past year was Epic Games’ move against Apple and Google app stores, major iOS and Android stores. Despite Epic’s interest in being able to deploy its own store in both ecosystems, this movement denounced both stores as monopolies in their respective systems.
Among the legal disputes, one of the arguments used by Epic is that the pressure of 30% was very abusive, especially for small developers. Apple reacted quickly by cutting the fee it imposed on small developers, something we thought Google should have copied.And at last they have.
Google Play will be less abusive and lower its rate to 15% for small developers
As Google itself has explained, any developer who sells through Google Play, either by an application or by micropayments, from now on will begin to receive more money for the first million dollars each year. Instead of the 30% commission that Google applies to developers, from now on the company will take 15%. According to the company, 99% of developers are in this band.
If by any chance you find yourself in a situation in which your application is billing more than 1 million dollars per year, it also affects you, and that is that the first million dollars Google will also apply the reduced rate and from there the rest of the income if they will apply the current rate of 30%.
While Google indicates that this reduced rate can help developers to better scale their application by hiring more engineers, adding marketing staff or increasing the capacity of the servers, they have missed a point that may be even more interesting. For a small developer, between development and maintenance costs, plus other taxes, this 15% reduced load can mean a sufficient profit margin for small developers to simply make a living.
The Google Play entry will be less abusive for small developers: Google will keep half the money that it took from you appears first in The Free Android.
