Education
Google delays mandating the Play Store payment law in India until April 2022
Google is postponing the implementation of its latest Play Store billing law in India to April 2022, days after more than 150 startups in the world's second-largest internet market forged an informal alliance to express concern over the 30 percent charge Android-maker plans to commit to its store and begin finding an alternative marketplace for their software.
The business, which will be living globally under the new Play Store rule in September 2021, is delaying the implementation of the policy only in India, it said. It's also listening to developers and willing to collaborate to allay their fears, he said.
We're setting up listening sessions with leading Indian startups to understand their issues more deeply. We will set up policy sessions to help clear up any additional concerns about our Play Store policies.
And we're also extending the period for developers in India to integrate with the Play billing system to ensure that they have enough time to introduce the UPI for the subscription payment method that will be made available on Google Play — for all apps that are currently using an alternative payment system, we set the deadline of 31 March 2022, said Purnima Kochikar, Director of Business Development for Games & A.
We've always said that developers should have an option about how to sell their software, and that stores should compete for customer and developer businesses, she said.
Google said last week that it will no longer enable any applications to bypass its payment system in the Play Store. The move, set by Google as a "clarification" of its current policy, would allow the company to ensure that it reduces in-app purchases made by Android apps in a variety of categories by as much as 30 per cent.
Google's announcement today is a direct response to India's loudest criticism over the decade — its largest consumer sector, but also a position where, relative to Western markets, it produces little revenue. More than 150 startups in India last week formed an informal alliance to battle the firm's powerful grip on the Indian app ecosystem. According to the research firm Counterpoint, Google dominates 99 per cent of the smartphone market in India.
Among the startups that have expressed concern about Google's new strategy are Paytm, India's most valuable startup, payment processor Razorpay, fantasy sports firm Dream11, social network ShareChat, and business e-commerce IndiaMART.
More than 50 Indian executives recorded these issues to the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology on a video call on Saturday, according to three people who attended the call.
Several companies in India have long raised doubts about how Google has introduced its policies in India, but the matter escalated last month after the company temporarily removed the Paytm app from the Play Store to facilitate gambling.
Google said Paytm has consistently violated its rules, and the company's Play Store has long banned gambling-promoting software in India. Google has sent alerts about gambling threats to a variety of other companies in India in recent weeks.
TechCrunch was told by a senior industry executive that the company should have raised these concerns months before IPL 's successful cricket tournament was scheduled to begin. Fantasy sports applications encourage users to select their favorite players and teams. These players stand to earn real money or points that they can redeem to buy tangible products on the basis of the real-world success of their favorite teams and players. The IPL season sees a significant increase in the popularity of such fantasy sports apps.
The IPL has also been postponed for months. Why has Google been waiting for so long? And why does the business have a problem with so-called gambling in India, when it allows such operation to take place in other markets? The Government of India has no issue with it, the executive said, calling for anonymity.
