Then have they repeatedly fought so hard legally to get to keep extracting three revenue? If they didn't care about it, they wouldn't do it in the first place.
replyThe problem is that there's no pressure on them to act any differently. If they made 100x as much money from app purchases, they wouldn't suddenly treat app developers better just because of that. They might treat them better if the app developers had better alternatives, but that would also be enough to force Google to behave differently even with the current amount of revenue.
Android and Chrome exist as moats primarily. Pichai came up in Chrome and understands moats. Obviously if you can get the moat to be self-funding (Google Play IAP revenue) even better. Things like "the developer experience on Android is bad" don't prevent the moat from doing its job, but "Google and Chrome aren't defaults on Android" are very much losing the moat.
replyI don't disagree with this. I don't honestly see how it relates to your previous comment that I responded to though. It seems more like support for my rebuttal, which is that the moat is what matters, not whether the revenue is a "rounding error" compared to their other businesses.
replyThis article in one sentence: "the developer of a small app switches to a third-party app store because Google Play ignores him." This doesn't hurt the balance sheet ($150 a month to Google is nothing), and doesn't affect the moat (this app isn't strategically meaningful and didn't even go away--it just moved).
replyThey chose to not monetize at all anymore because they decide it's not worth the hassle due to having other sources of income. If they didn't have the other sources of income, it doesn't sound like he'd choose to move somewhere else.
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