Google said it was running a pilot project to allow a “small number of participating developers” to offer an alternative payment option alongside the Google Play store payment system. Spotify is one of the first services affected.
“This pilot project will help us better understand if and how User Choice Billing works for users in different countries and for developers of different sizes and categories,” Google explains in a blog post.
According to Spotify, the pilot project between the two companies represents a “first in payment choice” and is part of a “multi-year agreement”.
Side-by-side payment options
Users who downloaded Spotify from the Google Play Store will have the choice to pay either with Spotify’s payment system or with Google Play’s billing system. The two payment options will be “side by side” in the app, Spotify says.
“Over the next few months, Spotify will work with Google’s product and engineering teams to develop this new experience, and we’ll roll it out to countries around the world. Working together, the companies will test and learn, jointly exploring product innovations on the Android platform. We plan to launch the first iteration of User Choice Billing later this year,” Spotify describes.
When announcing the pilot, neither company said how it would affect Google’s commissions.
Sameer Samat, vice president of product management at Google, says the changes are a continuation of Google’s decision to allow other payment systems in South Korea in response to new southern legislation. -Korean allowing Android app developers to offer alternative payment systems in apps.
Apple and Google under fire from critics
Apple and Google are under scrutiny around the world when it comes to payment systems for their app stores. Indeed, many regulators believe that the two giants hinder competition in the field of application stores and mobile operating systems. Earlier this week, Apple was fined 5 million euros by Dutch authorities for the ninth time, due to its repeated failure to update app stores’ anti-competitive policies against dating apps.
The weekly penalty order issued by Dutch regulators is capped at 50 million euros, so the iPhone maker can only be sanctioned for one more week unless the regulator issues a new one. order.
Epic Games, meanwhile, is still in dispute with the two companies over the practices of their app stores. It has been more than two years since the lawsuits began. As part of these lawsuits, the game developer accuses the two giants of carrying out anti-competitive and monopolistic practices due to their commission structure for app developers.
Apart from changes to the app store, Google also announced that it is ending the Play Movies and TV tab this week, with both programs expected to move to the Google TV app in May.
Source: ZDNet.com