Historic change at Google in allowing users of its Play Store app store to be able to employ alternative payment systems through other platforms.
It will no longer be mandatory to make payments in Play Store through Google’s own payment gateway
The choice will be possible via the option “Billing at user’s choice” (“User choice billing“), which will leave it up to the user to select the payment method. This option has been discovered thanks to the agreement reached between Google and Spotify.
Spotify currently has its own subscription service and will be the first to debut this new option since, despite installing the app in the Play Store, billing will not be done from the Google app store but directly from the Spotify website.
It is, on the other hand, a system similar to the one that “Fortnite” intended to obtain from the other major app store, Apple’s App Storein a controversy that ended last August with the removal of “Fortnite” from the two major app stores, both the App Store and the Play Store. Fortnite intended that payments should not be made from the App Store to, among other things, save users the price increase derived from the commissions that must be paid to the Apple platform for applications (and in-app purchases).
However a first step in the opening of Google in relation to the payments of its online store of applications came last year when the commissions on these operations were reduced from 30% to 15%. It also happens to be the case that two years ago South Korea initiated procedures for force Google to accept alternative payment methods in the Play Store. After that, this possibility has been developed until it became available for the rest of the users in other countries.
Now Google is offering users the possibility of choosing the way in which they want to make payments: either as before from the Play Store itself or from alternative payment platforms included by the app developers. The difference could be that the commissions to be applied in each case would be different, but for the moment Google has not reported what commissions would be applied and it also remains to be verified what prices developers apply to those who choose to make payments from their own platforms.
