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Google and Apple have been ordered to increase the length of their refund periods to seven days. Should either company fail to comply within a 15-day period, they’ll be liable to a fine of up to $50,000.

Ok, so the order has come from Tapei City and only applies to sales in Taiwan, but it’s a concern for both companies. Certainly either company can afford to take a $50k hit, but neither will be keen on taking that hit time and time again purely to stay within the legal framework of a single country. The order is applicable to all devices that use Android or iOS, so smartphones and tablet PCs initially but potentially anything else that either company has in the pipeline that uses their OS.

Google currently limits its refund window to 15 minutes, while Apple has no such automatic refund policy.

The issue is that the Consumer Protection Act in Taiwan requires all companies to give customers a minimum free trial period of seven days. Until now, app stores have not been compelled to comply with the act, but the City Government’s Law & Regulation Commission says that was only the case because mobile app purchasing was in its infancy. Now it’s established, app stores must also comply.

This is worrying on two fronts: firstly, should either company comply, the logistics of offering different refund windows for a single territory may prove unfeasibly tricky to work out. Secondly, the majority of apps – certainly games – have a relatively small window of usefulness before they’re cast aside in favour of newer ones. Should users be given the opportunity to trial these apps for free for seven days, the majority will be ready to move on anyway and apply for a refund as a matter of course and that will certainly harm developers, not to mention Google and Apple themselves who take a cut of the profits for each app sold on their respective app stores.

We’ll keep an eye on the story – what Google and Apple choose to do here may well set a precedent for other territories. Or they could just pull out of Taiwan altogether, of course…

You decide. Well, they’ll decide. But we’d like to hear your thoughts anyway. Post a comment in the box below.