Chrome Web Store payments deprecation(developer.chrome.com) |
Chrome Web Store payments deprecation(developer.chrome.com) |
Although about 70% of this list was rightfully killed. Stuff like youtube for 3ds and then it includes things that were simply renamed or updated.
I wish the site would say as much.
The deprecation route Google takes destroy enormous amounts of value.
Chrome extensions are a bit different because they have to be signed with another store by Google anyway.
There seems to be a lot more friction to sideloading a Chrome extension: download, unzip, turn on dev mode, click a button & navigate to the unzipped files...
Most frustrating is the migration. We have been live in the Chrome Store for 7 years, with varying prices. When someone subscribes, they are grandfathered at that price forever. But when we create our own payment system, how do we know what price someone was previously paying? We can either make our new customers really happy by charging all grandfathered users the lowest price we ever charged, or we can upset a bunch of our older customers by charging everyone the current price (which is 5x the former).
One fair way to accommodate everyone is charge the high price but if someone forwards us their receipt from the Chrome Store showing a different price, we apply a perpetual coupon to their account. But that will be super labor-intensive (and is susceptible to manipulation/abuse).
I did a major pricing overhaul with my SaaS company a few years ago and made lots of sincere appeals to users. They generally supported me and the app. I had some churn, but I knee it was coming. It worked out for the best.
Of course, my experience is going to be unique but with the right transparency and explanation you may be overcome a lot of reflexive pushback.
If you explain the predicament clearly, succinctly, and with as easy a resolution as possible, I think a lot of your customers will understand the situation and appreciate that you’re doing your best for them.
Another thing is that once their licensing API is gone there's no way to enforce any license attached to a particular user, so what happens with users that don't go through the migration process that is supposed to be set for this?
I think it would have been easier if they reached out to a couple of payment providers and ask them to write an adapter for their licensing system. That way all the developers could migrate to something else without affecting the users. But I doubt Google is willing to give any business to anyone.
Sure it does. It’s a big ‘fuck you’. Imagine if you’ve built a lifestyle business with this.
By going to your site and authorizing it to access their subscription data with their Google login, like you said in the following sentence. That counts as helping, no?
I don't mind that Google has decided to stop running a payment/subscription/licensing service for web extensions. Even though it's basically just an API to their services that run the Android Play Store (or should be).
But to not provide a way to export the information is pathetic.
> Exporting user licenses
> - Migrate to another payments processor
> - Migrate your licensing tracking
> ...
> ... You’ll need to use OAuth 2.0 with your users' consent ... . The general sequence is:
> 1. Implement your replacement payment/licensing scheme.
> 2. ...
When I got to (1) I couldn't help but feel like whoever's tasked with dealing with this is going to feel like they've just been asked to go from zero to "now draw the rest of the owl" without even a line sketch to springboard off of.
The bullet points before that are kind of similar as well.
Is it just that nobody paid for things? Presumably they're going to keep running the chrome web store, so isn't a cut of paymens "free money" to them? Is there some big cost to this I'm not seeing, maybe too much fraud?
I understand shutting down expensive products. It's weird keeping the expensive product running and shutting off the revenue model, no?
I always thought it was weird that my free extensions were distributed by a store. Expect Google to launch a new service with the same functionality and then deprecate the Chrome Web Store.
If you read the Chrome extension developers forums, you would have seen frequent posts about the payment system breaking, plus it was lacking lots of features like discount codes, letting you change subscription prices, being able to share purchases with Firefox (I wouldn't expect this from Google but it's a big negative) and letting you export user emails. It was clear Google wasn't interested in supporting the payments feature for a while. They've let it sit broken since the COVID lockdowns started which is completely insane (with unfortunate developers in the forums asking when it'll be fixed so they can integrate payments as if they think it's a one-off).
For what it's worth, I use Paddle + Firebase for a website SEO auditor extension I run (https://www.checkbot.io/) and it works well, where Paddle addresses all of the downsides above.
If anyone wants any tips on setting up something similar, feel free to message me. I know a lot of people recommend Stripe, but Paddle takes care of country specific tax and VAT for you which is a big plus for reduced admin.
My extension was originally meant to be a Chrome App but they deprecated those before I launched haha.
They'll ask for proof, just put you paid for a service that will no longer exist and include screenshots of the deprecation page.
Alternatively, simply wait 12-18 months and the same feature will be relaunched under a slightly different name by a different team
Google represents one type of software thankfully, web. It’s craziness at the end of the day. Examining this behavior takes you into the pathological where no other being exists, Thanos incarnate.
My takeaway: Google products & services exist to fill a gap until there's sufficient other options. As options increase, expect Google to "comfortably sunset" their solutions.
Read some of the other comments here. This is anything other than “comfortably” and will create a lot of pain & churn for Both the devs and users
A related fun fact: accounting data exports for extensions have been broken for me (and I think all extension merchants?) since April 2018. I had to get the NY attorney general to write them a letter before they would actually respond to my support requests so that I could properly file my taxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20588493. I'm sure that will be fun this year!
And I'm pissed.
It's only gradually becoming common knowledge, but eventually we're going to collectively realize that Google killed small ISVs, and at the time we all cheered them on.
Moreover, it sounds like they're saying there will be no solution for having the user purchase an app prior to downloading the app - all purchase flows will have to be in-app? This sounds like it will make for terrible UX, with apps not disclosing (or people not noticing) that they have no free features until after you've downloaded them....
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crosstext/gnlobfhf...
I probably have the video showing this back and forth between me and facebook, if probably posted on my now deactivated facebook
Was that just carelessness? Why not only notify users of the feature you are about to deprecate? Do they not have records of which app developers have used the payments API?
"Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."
-- Sovereign, Mass Effect
-- Mark Zuckerberg
I created my extension and started monetizing it March of this year...
It's because the user data is all protected under googles privacy policies, and you wouldn't be able to migrate that data to a third party without user consent. The process of asking for consent would harm Google's reputation more than the value of the spun out business. The PR damage is less by just shutting down.
I bought into the browser extensions heavily when they first became a thing - I was in high-school and would take pride in beefing up my browser with as many utilities as humanly possible. Once the novelty wore off it became apparent that I was using only a couple of them passively, and had absolutely zero need for the rest. Extensions seem neat in theory, but they're mainly useful from removing annoying/harmful behaviour from websites, and monetizing those cases is tricky. People would probably pay for Adblockers, but there's no need.
> Is there some big cost to this I’m not seeing
If I had to guess, I would imagine at some point someone had to revamp the payment backend for the store (because “software is never done” and people have to get promoted somehow), and reimplementing the gateway to extensions was deemed too much of a hassle.
I set up a DNS based blocker and that's more than enough. I don't try to hunt 100% of the ads, there's nothing wrong if some of them are displayed as long as the pages aren't fully bloated with them anyway.
I hypothesize that there's a very substantial intersection between the set of users who would benefit from extensions and the set of users who might be concerned about security implications of the current extensions system in Chrome.
I would also be interested to write & monetise extensions except that I anticipate usage may be limited due to the above.
For what it's worth you can create a new user profile in Chrome (click your profile picture in the top left then click "add"), and it'll open a new window which is completely isolated from all your regular browsing. It's a decent approach if you want to install a ton of dev extensions.
Also, I run a paid Chrome extension and have good conversion rates from the website -> downloading the free version, so I don't think a lot of users are that bothered by this anyway. People recommend Lastpass, uBlock and Grammarly all the time, which ask for wide permissions.
In a hypothetical world where Google and Alphabet are broken up into a bunch of small companies, would the Extension Store Company be making enough revenue to be viable?
The overhead for the Chrome extension store would be similar but much lower volume than the Android Play store, given that the attack surface (and thus APIs to monitor) are sandboxed by the browser, and the number of extensions is at least an order of magnitude lower than the number of Android apps.
So at "Google scale" this is a rounding error in their payment/licensing space.
The amount of profit from this has to be so tiny for Google or any mid cap tech company since no one really knows about it.
I made a comment with some upvoteS here a week or two ago about my hopes that the new Safari could maybe usher in an era of browser extensions being seen more as apps than current status quo but without the ridiculous high priced recurring prices being added more and more.
IE paying $1+ one time, or $1-3/mo, or $10-25/year being a not uncommon situation would be great in my opinion. Both stamp out the rampant data mining extensions do, legitimize extensions more, and hopefully get some indie developers paid.
So if a dev has thousands subscribers paying monthly through Google's system, they will all have to sign up again with a new payment processor - there is no way to migrate the payment info, only the license info.
And yes Google takes a cut each month so it's hard to imagine why they have decided to forgo these millions of dollars and at the same time hurt extension devs - because I can imagine a very large number of people deciding not to resubscribe :(
The problem today is that nobody can even make a browser. Even Microsoft failed, and was forced to adopt Chromium. The web has become far too complex.
Correct. Most people expect Chrome extensions for free.
The AG office isn't necessarily writing a personalized letter, but rather forwarding your complaint and maintaining visibility into the correspondence until it's resolved.
In this case, a complaint such as "Google operates a marketplace for web browser extensions. I generate revenue through this marketplace, and have been unable to obtain the transaction records for sales made through Google's marketplace that are necessary to comply with my NY State tax obligations. Please see attached for correspondence records of my unsuccessful attempts to resolve this situation to date."
AG's office forwards that to Google's legal team, asks for a response. Technically the AG's office doesn't care how the situation gets resolved, and they're just acting to facilitate the complaint and not as your personal lawyer. But in this situation a resolution/response of "oh yea, no we can't give you those our export button is broke" _would_ be of interest to the AGs office, since it potentially means there are many NY state residents unable to comply with their tax obligations and it becomes an actual issue on their radar to look into. So instead their legal team will track down whoever the hell is responsible/capable of providing those records, hand them over with a smile, get the matter closed with the AG's office, and give you a direct point of contact for the future, so Big Brother AG doesn't have to get involved (or see) future correspondence on the matter.
Actual responses will vary depending on the complaint. But issues that are likely to impact more than just you are likely to be taken the most seriously by the company receiving the complaint, since those are the ones that could be issues the AG decides to look into "on behalf of the State" and can lead to enforcement actions/fines/etc.
[1] https://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/working-for-tennessee/fil...
It wasn't quick, but it did seem to work. Here's the timeline:
- May 2018: I contact Google about being unable to export my accounting data from last month
- November 2018: after nothing but "thank you for your patience" emails, I complain to the AG
- early February 2019: I get a letter in the mail from the AG saying they'd forwarded the complaint to Google
- late February 2019: Google finally gives me my data [edit: I'd had April originally, but that was a separate request].
what makes you believe this? feel like this is Hobbes vs Rousseau
(For the record, I'm just parroting Neil Gaiman's excellent work on the Sandman saga...)
Stripe is a processor with more generous chargeback terms than many out there, but merchants with small payments still suffer from them very much.
Similarly, until I weaned myself off using Amazon for majority of shopping, I had minor anxiety over other Amazon stuff. Like my return rate and I had 2 incidents of being sent junk instead of the couple hundred dollar electronic. I’m sure they log how often it happens to a customer and it’s possible to not be stealing but still get booted if it happens too much.
Otherwise Google effectively just bin any issues that a customer service team should fix.
And if it turns out that there's a pattern of a _lot_ of developers who all recently signed up for first-time Google Play Developer accounts just to monetize Chrome apps, I'd be maybe a little surprised, but more than happy to have helped identify an unexpected trend.
I'd also be curious what happens if people ask the normal channels for the refund, of course.
- Default to an automatic resubscription for (say) 50-75% of the current list price
- Consent to OAuth2<->Google ("one-time blahblahblah"), and retrieve perpetual payment info that way
- Accept Store receipts (capturing all email headers and keeping all PDFs for cross-comparison... meh)
I wonder if you should send 2 warning emails or 3. ("action required" "your account will automatically be subscribed unless...")
This is maybe a gray-ish pattern, but would convert some percentage of users to a higher ongoing subscription level. This sounds like a line-of-business type extension, so that percentage may be marginally appreciable.
Perhaps combat the boringness aspect of the store-receipt process by sending solicitation emails ASAP to get that rolling.
And, hrm, anticipate refunds. :(
It would be a lot better if they would allow us to contact our users via email. Instead, we're going to have to use pop-up messages that annoy users and are likely to be reflexively closed by many of them.
I'd love to know what they are communicating to users, and when. At least then we could wait to communicate with them until just after they send an email, so that users would be less likely to ignore our messages. As is, it feels like we're flying blind.
Thinking about it, it's not really on point for Google™©® to connect you with your customers; your outreach could be considered unsolicited and G could be argued to be enabling spam. What a wonderful situation G has dug for itself here.
The only thought I can come up with is to partially break or otherwise "wait what"-ify your extension's behavior to concretely capture users' attention. You mentioned it does PDF processing of some kind; a relevant example in this case could be injecting new page(s) into generated output (or watermarking, but that may be mechanically trickier, and my knee-jerk connection to watermarking could wind up being "meep, this software has just gone rogue on me" - and depending on my stress level I may not actually read any notices).
Said injected (or overlaid) content would likely immediately first clarify that visiting the options page and clicking a giant green button will 100% revert functionality. It would probably also do well to include a website name (also showing a giant banner), a contact email address (RIP in advance), and possibly a suggestion/invitation to forward the PDF to internal IT for review in case of doubt (which would neatly offload some % of "???" to external labor that is incidentally highly trusted, but may look odd).
FWIW, I noticed the latest versions of Chrome have redesigned the extension UI; overflow icons have moved from the system menu into a dedicated popup. Some users (Windows) likely have this update, while others (eg, myself using Chromium 83.0/Debian, and version-locked enterprise users) don't. So hypothetical screenshots would need to illustrate both flows.
Besides all that, auto-renewing to some (non-low-end, because why not) percentage of the current list price, and straightforwardly handling refunds, seems to be the only obvious fallthrough I can see.
The biggest feature I miss from Inbox is the integration of TODOs and emails: you could create editable TODOs in your inbox as easily as composing a new email, and when viewing am email thread, you could create a TODO attached to an email thread (e.g. “review the attached document and reply with my feedback”).
Yeah, but we can't even auto-renew. We have to set up every customer new in Stripe and get their permission to charge them. There's literally no way for me to make this automatic. If Google is going to get rid of this functionality they should at least make it super easy for us to transition customers. Otherwise they're going to have a bunch of angry customers and devs on their hands.
Probably the only reason they bothered to post a notice and write a really lame migration plan is that a decent number of developers were making money from it and would pitch a fit if it just disappeared.
The original vision of the web didn't just have "sites with servers" and "consumers with browsers", but rather tons of potential independent "User-Agents" that would perform tasks on behalf of people. The consolidation of the web into just browsers, and subsequent flipflopping between creation and destruction (similar to the EEE cycle MS has employed), has killed whatever of that vision might have flourished.
I don't buy that argument. While I can't speak for all users, most of the extensions I use are ones which modify the behavior of the web browser or of specific web pages. They wouldn't have any meaning outside the context of a web browser.
Maybe paid extensions represented part of a different ecosystem? If so, though, it's one I never really encountered a need for.
Edit: I have maybe 20 extensions installed in general. Everything to killing websites ability to affect my ability to copy/paste to transcoders.
I am getting a kick out of all the people here saying that "no one pays for extensions". I've consistently made $50-100 from mine with no marketing whatsoever.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
(Keep in mind: I'm not saying Google is doing the right thing and trying to ensure an equal experience across browsers; I'm just saying I don't think they're intentionally trying to make their pages break other browsers)