In brief: Good news for developers looking to bring home more money from sales generated in the Google Play store. Starting July 1, Google will reduce the service fee it collects when a developer sells goods or services in the Google Play store by half for the first $1 million in revenue earned by a developer each year. Instead of Google taking a 30 percent cut, the search giant will only take 15 percent of the proceeds.
“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,” said Sameer Samat, VP of product management at Google.
The announcement comes just months after Apple rolled out a similar program for devs selling in the App Store. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two programs is that Google’s change applies each year to every Play developer. Apple’s program states that if a dev “falls below the $1 million threshold in a future calendar year, they can requalify for the 15 percent commission the year after.”
Just how much of an impact the fee reduction will actually have is unclear. According to Samat, “99 percent of developers globally that sell digital goods and services with Play will see a 50 percent reduction in fees.” But if only a small percentage of developers are responsible for the lion’s share of revenue generated on the Play Store, a change like this might not have as big of an impact as it initially appears.
Samat said Google will share additional details about the changes in the coming months.
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