Tinder Owner Sues Google Over Play Store Fees

Match Group, the dating apps maker, has sued Google on Monday in what it says is a last-ditch effort to stop Tinder and its other apps from being booted off the Play Store, Reuters writes.

That might happen because Match had refused to share up to 30% of its sales.

Match’s lawsuit reportedly accuses Google of breaking federal and state antitrust laws. Some of Match’s apps have been exempted from Google policies in the past, but Google now says it will block downloads of the apps by June 1 unless they only offer its payment system and share revenue.

Match says this could have dire implications for the company and cost it to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Google.

“This lawsuit is a measure of last resort,” Match Chief Executive Shar Dubey said. “We tried, in good faith, to resolve these concerns with Google, but their insistence and threats have left us no choice.”

Google counters that by saying Match had been trying to avoid paying for the “significant value” it gets. Google said it had to charge for its services and protects users against fraud, with its payment tool helping to deter scams.

This comes amid other such lawsuits, like the one Epic Games has also filed after it was booted off the several app stores for implementing its own payment method in-app, which was against the rules of those stores. And numerous U.S. state attorneys general and others have sued Google over alleged anticompetitive conduct.

Epic filed a lawsuit against Google recently in the same mode as Match, trying to persuade the tech giant from pulling Bandcamp, the independent music site it bought earlier this year, from the app store.

Read more: Epic Files Motion to Stop Google From Pulling Bandcamp From Play Store

Google is reportedly saying it will remove Bandcamp from the store because Bandcamp makes use of its own billing system rather than dealing with Google’s fee.

Bandcamp had been able to use its own billing system on Android because of a Google exemption for digital music, but Bandcamp CEO and co-founder Ethan Diamond said Google changed the rules now.