Google is slowly opening up the Play Store billing policy. The “User’s Choice Billing” pilot program, announced in March, is now accepting signups. Google describes the program in a support article, saying, “This pilot is designed to test whether an alternate billing option is offered alongside Google Play’s billing system and to help us investigate this choice of users. We’re looking for feedback in different countries and ensure that we can maintain a positive user experience.”
Developers interested in billing through an alternate provider can fill out Google’s sign-up form and it appears that Google will manually review each request. Currently, the regions supported are the European Economic Area (that is Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania , Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden), Australia, India, Indonesia and Japan.
Google doesn’t allow developers to use the pilot program for games – the biggest money makers – but only for apps.
With ‘user choice billing’, when a user goes to the POS system, a box will pop up asking if they want to use Google Play billing or any other third party service. (This list of choices should including Google Play billing.) However, in the European Economic Area, developers already have the option to opt-out of Google Play billing at all, thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act.
Aside from a few promotional tiers, Google and Apple both take about 30 percent, not just for purchases of newly downloaded apps, but also for digital purchases within apps already downloaded. Many developers view this cost as excessive, and the push within both ecosystems to enable third-party billing was originally intended as a solution to high app store costs. Several regulators have forced the Google/Apple app store duopoly to open up payments, but Google and Apple have both done so without solve the core problem of high app store costs. Apple takes a 27 percent discount on purchases processed outside of the app store — basically the original 30 percent fee minus the usual 3 percent processing fee charged by credit card companies. Google is doing something similar with this new program and will cut costs by only 4 percent.
You still have to pay a fee to your third-party payment processor, so with just a 4 percent discount from Google, developers aren’t going to save any real money. Registrations are now open, if you’re interested!
