What it costs to publish an app to Google Play and the App Store
The fees are public, small and easy to find. What costs a lot is what nobody puts in the budget: time, process requirements, and commission on what you sell inside the app.
The fees, which are the easy part
| Store | How much | How |
|---|---|---|
| Google Play | US$ 25 | once, forever, for all your apps |
| App Store | US$ 99 | per year, and the app leaves if you stop paying |
The difference in shape matters more than the difference in amount. Google is a toll at the gate; Apple is rent. An app sitting untouched in the App Store costs US$ 99 a year to keep existing.
The cost that is time
Google, personal accounts created after 13 Nov 2023: a closed test with at least 12 testers for at least 14 days before you may publish. It is not a review queue, it is a fixed duration requirement, and it holds a launch for a fortnight minimum. Organisation accounts skip it, which is why the account type is the first decision in the process.
Apple: review with no guaranteed turnaround, usually a few days. A rejection restarts the wait, and the commonest rejections are about forms, not code.
The cost that is commission
Here is the real money. If your app sells digital content or a subscription consumed inside it, both stores require the charge to go through their system, and they keep the commission.
If what you sell is a physical good, an in-person service, or consumption outside the app, the rule does not apply and you may use your own gateway. Delivery, bookings, product shops and gym memberships land here.
Getting that classification wrong is the commonest cause of an app being removed. Putting a card checkout inside the app to sell a digital subscription is a policy violation in both stores.
What else joins the sum
- a privacy policy at a public URL, required even if the app collects nothing;
- a data safety form, which has to match what the app actually does;
- an icon, screenshots and copy for each store, in each language you declare;
- a developer account in the right name. Publishing a company app under your personal identity is the sort of thing that only becomes a problem when you try to transfer it.
The US$ 0 route
The web. An app installable from the browser gives you an icon on the home screen, offline use and notifications, with no review, no fee and same-day shipping.
What it does not give you is presence in store search. If your app reaches people by link, QR code or messaging rather than by somebody browsing the store, the store is charging you for a shop window you do not use. The full test is in native app, PWA or website.
The short version
- US$ 25 once with Google, US$ 99 a year with Apple;
- the expensive cost is time: 12 testers for 14 days on a new personal Google account;
- commission applies only to digital content and subscriptions; physical goods and in-person services are outside it;
- a privacy policy and a data form are mandatory, and are the commonest cause of rejection;
- publishing on the web costs nothing and covers most cases.
The Google walkthrough is in publishing an app to Google Play, and charging inside the app is in in-app purchase.