Tinder Pulls A Spotify And Drops Google App Store Signups

Tinder removed Google Play Store integration within its Android app to avoid Google’s service charge, which can be as high as 30%.

Tinder users who want to subscribe to premium services will now be asked to enter their credit card information directly into the Tinder app, Bloomberg reported, citing new research by Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter.

Once a user inputs their payment data, the Tinder app will remember it and remove the choice to swap back to Google Play for future purchases.

“This is a huge difference,” Schachter said in an interview with Bloomberg. “It’s an incredibly high-margin business for Google bringing in billions of dollars,” he noted.

It’s not known if Tinder will also stop using Apple’s App Store, the news outlet said.

Tinder joins a burgeoning retaliation against the fees charged by Google Play and Apple. The billion-dollar app payment industry is dominated by Google and Apple and was expected to make $156 billion by 2023. App Store revenue was expected to increase to $96 billion, while Google Play was expected to grow to $60 billion.

Netflix Inc. recently stopped letting Apple users subscribe via the App Store and stopped supporting Google Play payments in May 2018.

Spotify filed an antitrust complaint against Apple and walked away from the in-app payment setup. Spotify alleges that Apple has restrictions in place limiting the apps that appear in the App Store, and thus limiting the services that compete with Apple Music.

Although revenue growth from games has slowed down in recent years, the popularity of subscriptions allowed apps to reach 57 percent year-over-year revenue growth last year. By 2023, it’s expected that games will only account for 60 percent of the revenue on the App Store. App revenue was expected to have a compound annual growth rate of 24 percent, compared to 12 percent for games revenue.