Google rolls out third party payments for all Indian developers

In response to recent regulatory developments in India, we are now offering all developers the ability to offer an alternative billing system alongside Google Play’s for their mobile and tablet users in India. If a user pays through an alternative billing system, the Google Play service fee will be reduced by 4%. Read this blog post and the updated Payments policy for more information.

If you don’t want to offer an alternative billing system, you do not need to take any action.

Integrating an alternative billing system
In order to maintain a safe and consistent user experience, developers will need to satisfy several requirements. Developers looking to add an alternative billing system in the short term will need to take a set of interim steps while we build APIs that will streamline integration in 2023.

If you would like to offer users in India a choice of an alternative billing system alongside Google Play’s, you must complete these interim steps:

1. Inform Google by completing the declaration form and accept the Terms of Service.
2. Identify the apps for which you will be offering user choice billing using the enrollment form that will be emailed to you after you complete the declaration form.
3. Follow trust and safety requirements by certifying PCI DSS compliance and giving users a way to report fraudulent transactions.
4. Follow our interim user experience requirements to ensure the choice of billing systems is presented in a consistent way and ensures that users understand the choice they are making.
5. Manually report to Google Play the amount of all paid transactions from users in India on a monthly basis until our APIs become available. We will email you instructions after you inform us of your intent.
6. Pay an adjusted Google Play service fee for transactions that use an alternative billing system outside of Google Play’s billing system.

Once you complete the alternative billing system declaration form, please refer to the instructions that will be emailed to you. These outline what information you are required to report to Google and what payments you are required to remit for service fees and taxes.

Alternatively, developers can wait to implement our APIs when they become available later this year, which will make it easier to implement and maintain user choice screens, invoicing and reporting. Developers that choose to implement before the APIs are available will be required to switch to our automated APIs once they become available.

CT Bureau