Developing a quality Android app deserves both recognition and some form of monetary gain. Unfortunately it seems that the Android Market billing is failing to deliver on the latter. A quick look over at the Android Market forums and you’ll see the problem is spreading like wildfire, so what’s the deal Google?
Starting on December 5, “payment was declined” notifications began showing their ugly face to developers selling apps in the Android Market. At first the problem seemed localized to a select few, but in the days following many developers reported nearly 50 percent of their orders showing “payment declined”.
For the moment the problem seems to be fixed, albeit temporarily. Some of the “payment declined” transactions have kicked into “cleared payment”. The bigger problem is that during the past three days, Google offered no support or response to support tickets and developers were losing revenue – you know, cold hard cash.
Many of the developers affected by the bug have demanded refunds from Google while others are simply looking for an honest explanation. During the outage, Google was still earning their 30 percent share of app sales despite developers not receiving payment so we can see the strong argument for a refund.
At the time of writing this piece, a Google representative did shed some light on the situation:
“As I mentioned on the other thread, we do deeply regret the inconvenience and pain caused to all of you, and take our responsibility to our merchants and developers very seriously. I certainly didn’t mean to be dismissive in my response.”
So should Google refund the 30% it received for app sales during the outage? Let us know what you think and if you are currently a developer for Android and had a similar issue over the weekend, drop us a line. We’re crossing our fingers in hopes that this was just a one-time glitch.
