Google takes a page from Apple's playbook, and developers stand to make serious cash

Google's developer policies are about to be a lot more competitive with Apple.

Google is lowering the amount of money it takes out of app subscriptions, from 30 percent to 15 percent, after the first year a user's been subscribed. That's exactly the same as Apple's policy, which was changed last year.

Here's how Google's transactions fees for developers will now be structured: for the first year, they'll get a 70 percent cut, with Google taking 30 percent. After the first year, Google's cut will drop to only 15 percent.

The change goes into effect beginning in January 2018.

Again, this is identical to changes Apple announced at WWDC in 2016, so it will be a welcome change for developers who want to get a bigger cut of their apps' profits.

For Google, it not only incentivizes developers to create more apps for Android, it gives extra incentive for those developers to create higher quality services, since they'll be significantly rewarded if their subscribers stick around for a year.

Transaction fees aren't the only element of app subscriptions Google changed. The company is also shortening the minimum length of a free trial to three days and allows developers to be notified when users cancel a subscription.

Google revealed at I/O earlier this year that Play Store subscriptions have been growing like crazy, with the amount of revenue and the number of subscriptions on the platform doubling in 2016, compared with the previous year.

Now, with even more developer-friendly subscription policies, those numbers could climb even higher.