Google will pay Android app developers more for retaining subscribers

Developers who want to sell apps or offer in-app subscriptions on Google Play have to give 30 percent of the revenue up. It's the cost of doing business on Google's popular app store -- and the same goes for the App Store and Microsoft Store as well.

However, in a move that mirrors Apple's policy change last year, Google will soon take a lower cut from developers who retain subscribers for more than a year.

As the search giant says on the Play Console Help page for transaction fees, developers will only give up 15 percent of the revenue that subscriptions generate in that case. This change will take effect starting January 1, 2018.

And, as is probably obvious, it will not apply to any revenue that developers generate from subscriptions that are canceled before the one year mark ends. What is unclear is when exactly this change will actually impact developers' revenue.

It seems likely that Google will reward them for the subscribers they have retained over the whole of 2017 -- and not just those that they will retain for a year starting January 1, 2018.

As mentioned earlier, Apple made a similar change back in June 2016. At the time, Phil Schiller announced that the company's cut would drop to 15 percent in the case of App Store developers that have users subscribed for longer than a year. Schiller noted that this applies "to all categories [...] including games." Google makes no distinction either.

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