Google made an announcement recently that is discontinuing the paid Chrome extensions. Earlier this year Google suspended the paid extensions for a short time and now they are going to make that change permanent it seems.
What other changes affect the developers?
The developers who were looking to monetize their extensions and using Chrome Web Store for the payments are out of luck since Google is getting rid of this possibility. The company has made public a timeline of the phasing out plan for the Chrome extensions. A significant change that was announced is that even the free trials are going to be disabled as well. Google also explained that if you have in-app purchases with Chrome Web Store or also use it to keep track of who has paid, you need to change to another payment processor. This change isn’t coming immediately but in the near future, so be ready for when this happens.
When will the changes take place?
Google mentioned that the changes will start taking place early in 2021, and to be more precise the said tat by February no one will be able to make in-app purchases with Chrome Web Store. Nevertheless, you will still be able to use the licensing API to determine if the users are currently licensed or not. However, as mentioned before this will not be available for long and will get discontinued soon after February 2021. The developers should already start working on the new systems they will want to use on the extensions and roll them out as soon as possible so that they can be ahead of the changes. We are not entirely sure of the motives behind this significant change but I’m sure we will learn more about it as we go.