Google expands its user choice billing pilot

Paul Feng, VP, Product Management said in part on Google’s Android Developers Blog: "Building on Android’s long history of continuously evolving to provide users and developers more flexibility and choice, we announced earlier this year that we would begin exploring expanded billing options on Google Play (GOOG, GOOGL)) through our user choice billing pilot..Pilot participants can offer an additional billing system alongside Google Play’s billing system for their users in select countries…When we announced the pilot, we noted that we were starting with Spotify (SPOT) as our very first partner. We’ve been working closely with the Spotify team and are excited to announce that this week they begin rolling out an initial test implementation of user choice billing to their users in select countries. We expect the experience will likely evolve over time as they continue to iterate and learn. Spotify has announced more detail on this rollout here. We’re also excited that Bumble (BMBL) has joined to partner with us in our user choice billing pilot. We’re working with their teams and we anticipate their users will begin seeing this choice in-app in select countries in the coming months. Additionally, with strong interest from developers around the world, in September we opened participation in the pilot to to all developers of non-gaming apps… we are excited to announce that based on the positive response and initial feedback from developers and users, we are expanding the pilot to users in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa." Reference Link