Google Follows Apple's Move By Slashing App Store Fees By 50%

Alphabet Inc’s GOOG GOOGL Google halved the Google Play store fee percentage for developers, replicating Apple Inc’s AAPL last year move, the company said in a blog post.

• Alphabet acknowledged a fee reduction from 30% to 15% for the first $1 million in revenue, followed by a program rollout on July 1 benefitting 99% of developers.
• “While these investments are most critical when developers are in the earlier stages of growth, scaling an app doesn’t stop once a partner has reached $1M in revenue — we’ve heard from our partners making $2M, $5M, and even $10M a year that their services are still on a path to self-sustaining orbit. This is why we are making this reduced fee on the first $1M of total revenue earned each year available to every Play developer, regardless of size,” the company said. 
• Epic Games recently filed a lawsuit against Google in Australia after filing multiple legal claims against Google and Apple in the U.S. and the U.K. regarding their anticompetitive practices of charging commissions in their app stores. Google faced similar antitrust charges in India too.
• Price action: GOOG shares traded higher by 1.99% at $2,107.62 on the last check Tuesday.