Google is shutting down its Chrome Web Store payments and will not allow developers to charge for extensions through its payments system.
“The Chrome Web Store payments system is now deprecated and will be shut down over the coming months,” Google said announcing its decision to shut down its Chrome store payments system.
Developers who are providing paid extensions through its store and using its licensing API, will have to find other ways to monetise. Google said that the decision has been taken as over the 11 years since it had launched the Chrome Web Store, “the ecosystem has grown and developers now have many payment-handling options available to them”.
“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,” Google said.
It had temporarily disabled new paid items in March following a large number of fraudulent extensions and payment scams. It has now made the ban permanent with the announcement made yesterday.
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It will disable free trials for extensions by December and by February 2021, all payments will be disabled. Developers will still have access to all their licensed data.
It will also shut down licensing API in the future to completely pull the plug on web store payments, it said.
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