[joshuamorton]

(I work at Google, but not at all on Android)

> The platform is open source. So if you want to use someone else's tools then you shouldn't have to pay this part, right?

The platform here includes "android", so yes if you aren't using Android you probably don't need to pay to support Android development. It's not clear here, but do you think "open source" somehow means "doesn't require funding to develop"?

> The cost of providing this is negligible. Many alternative stores and repositories do it for free.

Few/none of those provide app review and various anti-malware stuff. You can argue that these have negative value, but they absolutely have non-negligible costs.

Also I don't think any alternative stores support canarying/progressive rollouts of new versions, which is useful for developers and a nontrivial to support for other stores.

[ohgodplsno]

>Also I don't think any alternative stores support canarying/progressive rollouts of new versions, which is useful for developers and a nontrivial to support for other stores.

You have a career in comedy if you think that the Play Store's definition of canary rollouts is good. Hell, the entire Play Console is probably one of the most hated piece of software by android devs because of how terrible it is, with constant changes, horrible performance, stupid requirements and non-working options.

[Bobylonian]

Android is supported by others as well - it is not effort of Google only...

Yes, it is true, that there are other stores - like Samsung has it's own store on Android, so technically there is a choice of stores. Apparently Google would not fight store wars with the producers of hardware... but there is nothing that prevents them to disable any other stores by any other means - by simply sabotaging their app.

The issue here with Google Play is that it assumes, that Google Play has monopoly of money transactions for that publisher outside of Play store, even if the app has a choice to receive money through oher means - crypto, Paypal or cards. Same issue is with Apple store - they did not wanted to allow to transact money in Epic store(and wanted their cut on those), where you could make transactions in the Epic website from your card.