> I don't understand what Google is thinking about when they banned donations.

They're thinking that they're a monopoly and can do whatever the hell they want without needing to justify themselves?

hazarding a guess, i’m assuming people tried using off-platform payments described as donations to sidestep play store payments

Yes. This is what I suspect. But knocking out all donations using a big ban hammer is not acceptable here, it should be decided on a case-by-case basis. For example, a standard I can think of, is distinguishing donations and payments that influence the functionality of the application/service, and those that have no effect.

> But knocking out all donations using a big ban hammer is not acceptable here

To be fair they didn't. You can accept donations if you're an actual charity (like Wikipedia is). The line they drew isn't perfectly fair, no, but it's not a full ban hammer, either.

As far as I can tell, probably!

That way google gets a cut of the donation.

Oops, it's not a good idea! I now see the motivation behind it!

This is the reason Apple started doing this way back. Sad to see Google follow suit. I guess the bottom line is the bottom line...

I thought this was a Apple only thing and Google doesn't do this. For example, you cannot buy Audible books frim iOS apuo but can from the Android app.

You can, but I don't think you're supposed to direct your users to put their credit card info in, that all needs to be handled somewhere outside the app (with a message like please sign in on our website). Which seems very blatantly anticompetitive to me.

Now that I think of it, Uber has you put your credit card in. I'm not sure why that's allowed

It's allowed because Play Store in-app billing is only required for digital goods & services fulfilled by the app, not physical goods & services fulfilled outside your device. Uber isn't selling you app functionality, they're selling you the physical service of transportation, so they're exempt.

Quote from policy [1]:

Developers offering products within another category of app downloaded on Google Play must use Google Play In-app Billing as the method of payment, except for the following cases:

- Payment is solely for physical products

- Payment is for digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g. songs that can be played on other music players).

[1] https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/payments/

Oh, what if the donation link added you to a list of contributors to the website. Seems like that would be "digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself" which might be a workaround. Google might ban it anyway of course

I am sort of annoyed the other replier didn't see the sarcasm here, so I'm going to point it out, and note that it's funny -- seeing the motivation behind a behavior doesn't automatically invalidate it.

To clarify, it’s a 30% cut, not just some small payment processing fee.

What’s wrong with that? They’re paying to host and review the app and create the platform it runs on.

It's arguable since it's "donation" so one may expect to get the full donation instead of 30% cut by google but one may argue what exactly is (or isn't) a donation.

I’m not sure why you’d expect to not pay a fee. Google’s expenses are the same for apps that take a charge as those that take a donation. Credit card processors charge the same fees on donations.

A donation doesn’t magically make everyone else work for free.

> Credit card processors charge the same fees on donations.

Yes, they charge 1/10 of what Google charges. The 30% has nothing to do with how much it cost them to run the service, so let's not pretend that they _have_ to charge them.

(I'm not saying they should offer cheap/free donations, I just don't think it's fair to talk about how much it costs them to run the service given that that's clearly not the driving factor)

A paid app means Google gets to claim some revenues out of it.

So Google can make the donation go through them, cripple the normal version, and take a 20% processing fee?

30%

And then Google gets ~30% of your donations.

For sure Google would reimburse that rake off since they have been prodigious beneficiaries.

That's what PPSSPP already does. AFAIK PPSSPP Gold only differs in price and the icon.

So Google get what they want. The sweet 30pc cut on donations