I doubt they would start charging developers to publish to their app store. This seems completely out of line with the rest of their Android strategy. I wonder why the VC said it?
But even if they did, it wouldn't contribute significantly to the company's revenue - not sure how many developers Google has, but Apple has 380,000 registered developers[1], and even if they all pay $99/yr, that's 'only' $38 Million. Against Google's approx $60 Billion revenue[2], that doesn't move the needle at all.
Google used to give developers 70% of app purchase revenue, give carriers 25%, and keep only 5% for themselves. A year or so ago they moved to keeping almost all of the non-developer pie. That pie is closer to $2bln than $38mln. But if they're going to take more, the only place left to take it from is developers. I can't believe that's going to go over well for them, but I already can't believe carriers rolled over so easily despite giving Google things it really needed, like carrier billing for app purchases.
[1] http://www.beyonddevic.es/2014/06/25/what-we-learned-about-g...