A Google developer advocate, Reto Maier, in July 2009:

I was wondering why we made this change? I’m worried that I can no longer say ‘Google doesn’t take a cut, we just cover our transaction costs’. Why not give developers more and pressure carriers to reduce the cut?

I missed who wrote this one, apologies:

We have previously said that we don’t make money from Market, we are now lying. Let me repeat that, we are now lying to our developers by not making this change public (for 6 months now!)

Google’s public blog post in October 2008 introducing the Android Market explicitly stated that “Google does not take a percentage.” I’m not completely clear if Google was already taking 5 percent at that time.