Google has decided to appeal Competition Commission of India’s fine over ‘unfair’ business practices on Android.

Google was fined $113.60 million by Competition Commission of India in relation with Play Store policies in October 2022. The Competition Commission of India found Google requiring device manufacturers to pre-install its entire Google Mobile Suite and mandating prominent placement of those apps “imposition of unfair condition on the device manufacturers” and thus was in “contravention of the provisions of Section 4(2)(a)(i) of the Act.

Google informed that it has decided to approach National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), the nation’s appellate tribunal, to appeal against the fine.

Google is raising the quality bar on Android apps, with sharing insights and notices to both, the developers as well as users. Quality of an app is as important to the end user as it should be to the developer, as that is what will get in the performance as well as good reviews.

One of the most important ways to boost your app quality and attract more users is to focus on technical quality. For this, the developers would need to follow a certain set of guidelines as well as receive insights from Play Store, in order to keep track of the usage and keep improving the app based on the metrics and feedback.

The starting point for maintaing the technical quality of the app should always be Android’s Core App Quality Checklist. Make your app experience as compelling, smooth, and safe as possible. Work through the tests on this page to assess your app’s visual experience, performance, security, and more.

The next pit stop in the journey to improve your app quality would be to keep monitoring Android Vitals in your Play Console.

Android Vitals reports on key user-impacting issues and helps you to debug and prioritize across them. It gives you a comprehensive understanding of your stability on Android with visibility of user-perceived crashes and ANRs (Application Not Responding errors), includes stack traces, event tags, and device information to help you understand and resolve problems as well as set up alerts so you can respond to new and emerging issues as quickly as possible.

To improve quality across the board, Google enforces an overall bad behavior threshold. The threshold is 1.09% for user-perceived crash rate, and 0.47% for user-perceived ANR rate. To maximize your app’s visibility on Google Play, it’s important to stay below these thresholds. If your title exceeds the device bad behavior threshold on any core vital for a given phone model, then Google Play may reduce the visibility of your app for users on that phone model and start showing a warning to the users downloading the app, below the Install button.

Users expect great experiences on their devices, and developers who deliver on their expectations will achieve greater success on Google Play!

Google starts third-party billing in play store with Spotify and Bumble’s users as the chosen ones for the pilot testing.

It hasn’t been a secret that Google and Apple have long been restricting their App developers to use only their own payment gateways for any purchases on Play Store as well as in-app purchases. While this has brought in a lot of revenue to both of them, so has it brought in lot many penalties across many country’s competition watchdogs blaming them of misusing their dominant position in the market and direct terms on the developers going against healthy competition. The latest one of such penalties coming from the Competition Commission of India imposing a fine of $113.60 million on Google for such practices.

Google announced the policy change, called User Choice Billing, in March. They call it a “pilot,” and expanded the test to the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa on Thursday in addition to previous regions including Australia, India, and Europe.

As per the User Choice Billing, Google is basically allowing end users to choose if they want to be billed directly inside the app, without the app owners being charged the, close to 30%, cut by the Play Store, or they want to continue to be billed via the Play Store, where the current commissions remain as they were. So while it is a welcome move by Google to give both, the app owners as well as app users, a choice, they still make it mandatory that the choice should remain and that Google Play Store billing is not going anywhere.

Google said the pilot is available to non-gaming apps that comply with its user interface guidelines about how to implement the billing. Also, Google will continue to charge developers the service fees. Developers must pay Google the applicable service fees. When a consumer chooses to use an alternative billing system, the service fee the developer pays will be reduced by 4% as it helps support their investments in Play Store and Android.

The Competition Commission of India, for the second time within a month, has fined Google, for abusing its dominant position, this time with respect to its Play Store policies.

Only last week, the Indian competition watchdog had fined Google $161.95 million with respect to its Android mobile device policies.

As per the press release, the Commission found Google to be dominant in the markets for licensable OS for smart mobile devices & market for app stores for Android smart mobile OS, in India.

Google’s Play Store policies require the App developers to exclusively and mandatorily use Google Play’s Billing System not only for receiving payments for Apps but also for certain in-app purchases. Further, app developers cannot, within an app, provide users with a direct link to a webpage containing an
alternative payment method or use language that encourages a user to purchase the digital item outside of the app.

Google has been fighting this battle of being asked to open up its Play Store payment methods to alternative payment methods as well, over and above the ones offered by Google, across multiple countries.

As of now, there is no response from Google on the fine. We’ll keep the post updated as more news comes in.