China’s app developers can finally offer paid apps in Google Play store

Finally, after years of waiting, app developers in China can now make money from their Android apps in the Google Play store. No longer are Chinese devs limited to offering free apps to a global audience – now they can charge for paid apps, in-app purchases, and subscriptions. The move was announced by Google overnight (hat-tip to TechCrunch for spotting this).

China’s app developers can now sell their apps to Google Play users in more than 130 countries. Google will pay them in US dollars into their Chinese bank accounts.

Previously, Chinese developers could only monetize by using an ad platform on Android. Or by developing instead for iOS and charging for the apps in the Apple App Store.

But none of today’s news applies to the hundreds of millions of Android device users in China. That’s because Google Play has never offered paid apps, from developers anywhere in the world, to Chinese consumers. Indeed, Chinese authorities’ deliberate “throttling” and slowing down of Google’s web sites in China since 2010 (when Google took a stand against censorship and shut down its local search engine) left Google Play almost unusable in the country. That left the doors open for a billion-dollar industry in third-party Android app stores in China – a sector that’s now dominated by app stores created by local web giants like Baidu, Tencent, and Qihoo.

Virtually all Google services have been blocked in China since June.

However, Google’s impasse in China might soon come to an end – sort of. A report yesterday in The Information cites reliable sources that Google is looking to create a China-only version of Google Play. If that happens, Chinese developers could finally sell paid apps to their fellow countrymen.

See: Google: Asia is the only true “mobile-first” region