alt Hacker NewsI think it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store. If they would take that tax and provide good feedback and speedy version reviews, nobody would ever complain - it is expected to pay something since the play store doesn't run on good thoughts and prayers. But because they're a monopoly (or a duopoly if you count apple, which is a different platform altogether) they can afford to act this way.
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Author here: Indeed, 15% is fine. They do provide some services. They provide the CDN for downloading the APK. They handle sales taxes in the various countries, which would be a PITA to handle yourself. Similar-ish services like Patreon charge a fee too. The 30% they charged a couple of years back was bad. But I could live with 15% if the support were anything other than zero.
This is a pretty common sentiment. I make iOS exclusive apps because I know when facing any problem Google support will be non-existent. Apple takes ages to respond but has been known to be humanly possible so far.
Yeah this the thing that grinds my gears about Apple too. These fools will argue in court out of one side of their mouth that the cut is used to police the store etc and do reviews then out of the other side of their mouth they just don’t do it or give the most mediocre half assed attempts and collect the revenue. Which is it? You shouldn’t be able to charge people and not provide the service your charging them for
And that's my problem with such business practises in general. Take an example of Claude. Not only, at this point, their models might be just marginally better than the open weight competition, they also also makes it entirely impossible for you to reach human support in case of an issue (and I am talking about real money related issues). You just can't do it. Yes, there's an email but that is also handled by the same bot.
I just don't understand how these companies can get away with that. These are the aspects of life that tells very clearly how most Govts are not chosen and ran for "the people" but the few, not the conspiratorial spirals. These are the smaller, but harsh Kafkaesque realities of life that says we lost this to the power of the "rich" - and it's an abstract power, it's not fixed, and if someone from the "masses" manages to become part of it they also reap the benefit but by the design of things that number has to be really small.
Okay, it deviated. The point is
> provides terrible support for their own play store.
Something like this is so abhorrent and yet is it normal and I didn't even start at how they can just charge 15 and 33% for of the incomes.
Of course people would complain, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to have the same expectation of what a fair fee is that somehow exactly matches the current fee (even if the service is great)
people hate taxation without representation. That's why this model has to be unsustainable, but the legislation has not caught up at all.
> it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store.
The terrible support is really deeper than support. You literally stopped doing business here, because the lack of a feedback channel that allows Google to improve their business (i.e. realize they need a way to quickly correct stupid automated decisions) been Google's worst enemy and best friend. By ignoring support & feedback, the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way), but it leads to I think a lot of Google's products failing because they do not really understand their users, and the why behind the what they use.
I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.