Google In India, Tale Of Postponed 30% Cut & Paytm Mini App Store: Delays Don’t Hide Big Fault Lines

“When you take what we earn, you don’t grow together. You grow at our cost. Young co’s seek tax rebates & holidays from governments. And Google takes all this money spent by Indians on other Indian’s apps to offshores. Depriving us of our capital investments, jobs & growth,” says Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm, in a tweet. He has been one of the most vocal opponents of Google’s often opaque polices. Paytm got into a tiff with Google last month when Google removed the Paytm app from the Play Store, just ahead of the start of the IPS 2020 cricket tournament, citing that some of the cashback offers available on the platform amounted to betting. The app was later reinstated, and Paytm had pointed out at the time that Google’s own Google Pay app in India was running similar offers. Google Pay rivals Paytm in the digital payments space.

But is it really new? For all the protests and the anger towards the 30% commission that Google wants to charge for in-app transactions, it isn’t exactly new. Yet there are changes that worry Indian app developers. Google maintains that of all the developers on the app store, less than 3% of developers with apps on Play sold digital goods over the last 12 months. The company also says that of this 3%, as many as 97% of the developers already use Google Play’s billing. This is where the big compliance requirement kicks in, which is causing a furore. Google had said that those developers that need to update their apps to comply with the new Google Play Billing policy, they will have until September 30, 2021 to make those changes to the apps. New apps or updates that are submitted for the Play Store after January 20, 2021 will need to be in compliance. All that now stands delayed.

“We’ve always required developers who distribute their apps on Play to use Google Play’s billing system if they offer in-app purchases of digital goods and pay a service fee from a percentage of the purchase. To be clear, this policy is only applicable to less than 3% of developers with apps on Google Play. We only collect a service fee if the developer charges users to download their app or they sell in-app digital items, and we think that is fair,” Sameer Samat, Vice President, Product Management, had said in an official statement while announcing the policy changes late last month.

It isn’t as simple as it seems. Till now, if an Indian app developer was using an alternate payment method and not Google Play, they will now have to compulsorily use the Google Play platform—and pay Google a 30% commission on every transaction done.