Google has announced that it will remove some Indian apps from its Play Store. The recent announcement from the company is related to a dispute over service fee payments. As per Google, 10 Indian companies have avoided paying fees on in-app payments despite benefiting from the platform.
The dispute centers on the startups' efforts to stop Google from imposing a fee of 11% to 26% on in-app payments in India after antitrust authorities ordered it to dismantle an earlier system of charging 15% to 30%. But Google effectively received a go-ahead to charge the fee or remove apps after two court decisions in January and February, one by the Supreme Court, not to give any relief to startups.
“After giving these developers more than three years to prepare, including three weeks after the Supreme Court’s order, we are taking necessary steps to ensure our policies are applied consistently across the ecosystem, as we do for any form of policy violation globally,” Google wrote in a blog post.
Google has sent notices of Play Store violations to Indian companies Matrimony.com, which runs the app BharatMatrimony, and Info Edge, which runs a similar app, Jeevansathi. Both companies are reviewing the notice and will consider next steps, their executives told Reuters.
The move "literally means all the top matrimony services will be deleted," Murugavel Janakiraman, the founder of Matrimony.com, told Reuters. Info Edge founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani said it had cleared all pending Google invoices in a timely manner and was compliant with its policies.
Google's app removal could anger the Indian startup community which has been protesting many of the U.S. giant's practices for years. The firm, which denies any wrongdoing, dominates the Indian market as 94% share of phones are based on its Android platform.
Google says its fee supports investments in the app store and the Android mobile operating system, ensuring free distribution, and covering developer tools and analytic services.
Just 3% of the more than 200,000 Indian developers who use the Google Play platform are required to pay any service fee, it added.
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