A few months ago this year, on March 27, the paid extensions got primarily suspended by Google, the colossal company. Although it was a temporary change, this time Google has come up with the decision of permanently putting a toll over the paid Chrome extensions.
Moreover, the giant company added that they would probably, later in December 2020, disable the free trials as well. Developers will have time till December to export customer data until the feature is completely prohibited in 2021.
Discontinuation of the paid Chrome extension suggests that the developers with the intention of monetizing their extension, henceforth, will be prohibited from doing the same on the Chrome Web Store Payment. A timeline of the extinction of paid Chrome extensions is also shared by Google.
In the coming future, developers who are using Chrome Web Store payment to charge for their extension or in-app purchase are advised by Google to find another platform for payment. The giant company in an official post made the points clear and said that:
“If you use Chrome Web Store payments to charge for your extension or in-app purchases, you’ll need to migrate to another payments processor in the near future. If you use the licensing API to keep track of who has paid, you’ll need to implement another way of tracking user licenses.”
No money will be charged by in-app purchases and existing items with Chrome Web Store payments from 1st February’ 21, added Google. Moreover, the Company further said that,
“After payments is disabled, you can still use the Licensing API to determine if users are currently licensed. However, this is also deprecated and will be shut down at some point, so you should begin migrating your license tracking to a different implementation.”
It can be assumed that Google is hinting at interested developers to use “third-party service” on the ground that they provide “far more diversified functions” than a single provider like Google. In addition to all this, the company commented that they can “safely abolish our integrated payment system” because the developers, who previously relied on Google have multiple, excellent choices.
