Google Play Now Accepts Paid Android App Submissions From New Seller Countries
While Google’s top brass were busy dissecting the company’s Q1 earnings on their scheduled conference call, it was business as usual for the rest of the company. Over on the official Android Developers blog, for example, Google announced that developers in the Czech Republic, Mexico, Israel, and Poland can now sell Android apps and in-app additions in the Google Play store (and in their native currencies to boot).
“But wait,” you may say. “Developers from Israel and Mexico have been able to sell their apps for years now!” You’d be absolutely right — the Czech Republic and Poland are the only really new additions, but there was a bit of a catch for the other two.
At the time, developers in Mexico and Israel could only sell their apps through an AdSense merchant account and set prices in U.S. dollars. With this new change in place, Google now supports both countries’ respective currencies. The process for Israeli or Mexican developers to make the transition seems a bit hairy though — Google outlines the whole thing here, and it involves creating a new Google account and re-registering with Google Play.
So what does this mean for you developers? Well, unless you live in one of the aforementioned countries, not a whole lot. While most of the work will have to be done by developers operating out of those locales, Google still suggests that you consider whether or not you want to set a specific price for each of those new markets instead of just letting your default price ride.
Those minor issues aside, Google now officially supports paid application sales from developers in 31 countries. It sounds pretty good until you realize that it’s taken over a year and a half for Google to add these new names to the list of supported countries. I’m sure that developers in those countries will appreciate that Google has finally gotten around to them, but there are still quite a few that haven’t.
A link to the post was shared by the Android Developers’ Google+ account, inspiring a litany of requests from people asking Google to support their countries as well, prompting Android Developer Relations Lead Reto Meier to apologize for the delay. Then again, Google’s always been very upfront about this sort of thing — they note in their list of seller countries that they are “unable to provide any guidance on timelines.”
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