Google secretly pays Android developers for their code: the open web is no longer enough for its AI

We all have a file gathering dust on a hard drive, that of development projects that have never been completed. An app prototype, two or three pieces of code written on a Sunday evening, then forgotten. What if Google handed you a check for all that? This is, basically, what the firm has started to do with a handful of Android developers.

The 404 Media site revealed the existence of a program that Google itself presents as “confidential”. In an email consulted by our colleagues, the Partnerships team invites hand-picked developers, especially those whose apps have millions of downloads, to join a pilot. The idea: get paid to give access to your code, that of apps in production as well as that of old archived prototypes. The developer would keep 100% of its rights, under a non-exclusive license, and could continue to monetize its code elsewhere. The word “AI” does not appear anywhere in the message: you have to follow a link to a Google page dedicated to “partnerships to improve our AI products” to understand where the code really goes.

When the web is no longer enough to feed AI

This is the real signal. For years, AI giants have served themselves to the open web without asking. This reservoir is running out. Google had already paid around $60 million a year to access Reddit data in 2024, it would now go after the private, never-published code of individual developers. The reason is not trivial: the firm is lagging behind the AI ​​that programs. Claude Code, the Anthropic tool, accompanied a fundraising that propelled the start-up ahead of OpenAI at the end of May, at $965 billion, and Microsoft has established itself among coders. Buying “real” production code means trying to make up for this delay with fuel that can no longer be found for free.

Concretely, who is concerned? A handful of studios and developers sitting on large, successful code bases, to whom Google would offer unprecedented income without making them lose ownership of their work. For everyone else, nothing: the invitation remains closed. And this is where the gray areas appear.

The program would be “confidential”: should you hide it from your employer, your associates, or even the open source contributors who wrote part of the code? Who really owns this code when it was written by several people? The amount proposed remains secret. As for Google's spiel about an AI that would help "detect diseases earlier", it sounds a little strong for a project whose real goal is to strengthen an auto-completion tool for coders.

Google has not yet made any public comments on this program. We therefore do not know the amounts offered to developers, the geographical scope of the pilot, and whether the amounts vary depending on the number of downloads or the complexity of the code.

Selling abandoned code for a check, after all, why not. But the main thing is elsewhere. When Google, which has been crawling the web for more than twenty years, starts paying developers one by one for their private code, it means that the great free scraping party is coming to an end.