Expect to Pay When You Setup Your Pitch in Googles Marketplace
If you want to have your application listed in Androids Marketplace the first thing you have to do is pay them $25. That’s right, even if you’re developing a free application for their open platform to list on their “user-driven” marketplace, it’s going to cost you a $25 entry fee.
Do you have an app you’d like to to sell?, well, if you make a sale via the Marketplace, that’ll be another 30% (yes, thirty percent) of your sales going to them. The post on the developers blog says the 30% “goes to carriers and billing settlement fees-Google does not take a percentage”, but it was Google who made this arrangement, so they shouldn’t expect to hide from developers comments by pointing the finger at the other guys.
Now lets compare this to some of the other options; AndAppStore.com take 0%, the money goes straight to the developers PayPal account. SlideME say 3 to 5% based on the processing charge, and if the developer takes payments direct then it’ll all depend on they payment mechanism, but they shouldn’t expect to pay more than 10%.
Given that Marketplace already has advantages over competitors due to being shipped with the ‘phone it would suggest how Google persuaded carriers to take on the Android OS; namely giving a cut of all application sales to them. If you want to imagine how enticing that might be then think about being able to sell your house and get a cut from all the furniture the new occupant buys, or sell your computer and get a cut from all of the software the new owner pays for, then you’ll start to see why I think we may have just found the sweetener which made T-Mobile start singing the open song….