For many years, there exists discrimination of some (mostly) central and eastern members of EU. They can’t sell their Android applications on Android market. Most interesting is, that Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia and Greece has EURO as their currency, but Google is “unable” to send money to these countries. As far as I know, Google is sending money from Ireland to EU countries, so I really don’t understand, what is the difference between sending euros to Austria, Germany etc. and sending euros to Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia and Greece.
Also there is one of objectives of the union:
- an internal market where competition is free and undistorted;
But in this case, I think that this objective is not followed, because for example German developers can sell their products to Slovak customers, but Slovak developers can’t sell their applications to German customers.
Map of EU (and some non EU) members, that can sell applications on Android market:
http://support.google.com/androidmarket/developer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=150324
Not discriminating software developers from many EU countries by big companies can help to fight Economic crisis.
(Also this is in contrast with Google’s own informal corporate motto “Don’t be evil”…)
Pavel Michal Pavlasek
Software developer from Slovakia, EU
This really sucks. Let’s start digging deeper and see if we can sue Google, or at least threaten them with a lawsuit. I think the EU commission is quite protective about this.
Daniel
January 30th, 2012
I’m from Estonia. And I find it really irritating that I can’t sell apps.
Plekk
February 20th, 2012