I'm building an advertising platform for iOS and Android. This works quite similar to any other advertising platform where the advertisers can run ad campaigns until a credit limit they set. A user will be able to set custom credit limits. IAPs are fixed.
After a successful campaign, how should I charge the user? I was thinking to use PayPal gateway but seems like Google Play and App Store does not allow non-physical purchases inside an app except IAPs. I'm a bit confused how to do this.
Any guidance will be highly appreciated.
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I'm currently very much confused about with which subscription service to use between any Third-party or Google's In-App billing system.
Let me explain first , I have an app which is providing service to Landlord for Posting their vacant Properties where we are providing free trial 60 Days for full app features & after trial expires I would like to add Subscription Plans as below:
Silver: Less than 50 units (monthly or yearly)
Gold: Less than 51 - 100 units (monthly or yearly)
Platinum 100 and up units (monthly or yearly)
Now I'm exploring options to include to implement this subscription features & found that Stripe would be a good option for me but soon I find out about in-app purchases guidelines where they mentioned that In-app purchases must use Google Play’s payment system & also mentioned , examples of products not currently supported by Google Play In-app Billing:
So , basically there are two questions from my side :
Can I use other payment system or should I need to use Google's Play Billing system ?
For Google's Play system , How can I divide or how many subscriptions items will be there for above subscriptions plans?
Any help would be appreciated!
You can use both services Stripe and Google IAP(In App Purchases) or just 1 of them.
I suggest that you go with Google IAP since you do not have BE(BackEnd) and as I understand would be hard for you to maintain card numbers and everything.
Google IAP provides an SDK so that you can manage subscriptions on the Play Developers Console yourself. It also provides sandbox environment so that you can test it but also Stripe does that.
Here are some references:
https://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_subscriptions
https://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_overview.html
but I guess you have gone through them already. In the company that I previously worked on we were developing a project with pretty much the plans you described above and we used Google IAP and Apple IAP(for iOS/tvOS) without any problems. Furthermore we were able to query Google or Apple for previous subscriptions and let customers actually renew them instead of buying new ones.
As you mentioned the leasers/landlords will not be able to pay electronic bills with Google IAP but you can integrate Paypal/Stripe/BrainTree/WePay or any other alternatives for that.
Having mentioned that I would like to answer your questions now:
1) Yes you can use Stripe instead of Google IAP
2) You can divide subscriptions and you can manage them in your Google Developers Console at https://play.google.com/apps/publish/. However that can happen after you uploaded an .apk in console with in-app-billing dependencies and also permissions.
Hope it helps!!!
Your particular scenario is a bit of a grey area.
As a precedent the Autotrader app in the UK is using direct credit card billing in-app and this is a similar service to yours - i.e they are selling listings.
This seems correct to me because in app billing is designed to be used for digital content to be consumed in the app - not for real world services. Google may even reject your app for it.
In this case my advice would actually be to use Stripe or some other billing platform.
As for your billing model - it doesn't really fit the subscription model. I don't know specifically about Stripe but with Google you can't have a subscription AND a limit on items in the way you describe. So you would have to manage the listing limits yourself on your own backend.
There are some edge cases though - what happens if you use all of your 50 listings within the month? Do I have to buy another whole subscription?
The most suitable payment model I can see for you is Metered Billing from stripe - essentially pay as you go.
I recommended to use Google's In-App Billing. Because most of country payment support by google and user first trust on google that most benefit for you.
The mobile application I am building has got payment features (both for buying some coins and subscription of (1 month, 3 months and 12 months) for premium accounts. Here, I should not directly ask card details to pay for the users, instead I need to the user's device stored payment to pay for the mobile application (it may depend on ios and android) I am building. Also, how do the subscription works and keeps making charges to the mobile application timely?
Actually, I need help with the implementation mechanism. I am new to this kind of scenario.
For iOS payment you should go with in-app purchase. It is apple's payment gateway. It has facility to create different subscription plan with duration. So, all things which you want that managed by apple. Same way for android , google have also same mechanism for payment(in-app feature).
I'm somewhat confused by the terms of the developer content policy (here). Is it possible to use Paypal (or any alternative paying method) instead of in-app purchase (iOS) and in-app billing (Android) for a monthly-recurring PREMIUM membership on my app?
A premium member can access more content and doesn't see ads, but by reading the guidelines, it seems that I must use the built-in in-app purchasing program, is that correct or am I just a bad reader?
Thank you in advance.
Dont know about android but your app will be rejected. According to section 11.2 of the App Store Review Guidelines for iOS (Login Required) any app that doesn't use In-App purchase will be rejected.
11.2 Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an app will be rejected
Additionally, note that any purchase of real world goods or services is not allowed as per section 11.3. I suggest reading the whole document, or at least section 11 (and 20 if it's a charity app). That should give you a pretty good idea of what's allowed and what's not.
Is the Google Wallet online payment system on Android phones mandatory for e.g. movie, songs or game levels purchases in a similar way the Apple’s In-App-Purchase is on iOS?
According to the information here “Developers offering additional content, goods, or services for an application downloaded from Android Market must offer an authorized Payment Processor as the payment option“.
Our understanding is that if user has installed an application, which plays movies and users pay per single movie view application needs using the Google Wallet otherwise it can be removed from Google Play. Is that correct?
Similar situation is within game if user wants to pay for the additional level. Is that correct?
For subscriptions it is not required to use the Google Wallet (again the similar situation is on the iOS).
STeN
I had an app that had LogiaMobile billing integrated and was rejected from Google Play for that very reason (it was in Sept 2011). The app tried to bill users when they wanted to download videos.
Find a good explanation about the policies in this Techcrunch article
My advice would be to always integrate Google In-App billing (now v3 is far more confortable to work with).
I hope this is what you were asking for :)
'Google Wallet' is a confusing name, because it may refer to different thing. First there is the Google Wallet app that lets you pay with your phone via NFC. You certainly don't need this to buy things from the Play Store and it is supported only in the US, and only on a limited number of devices. Google Wallet also refers to Google's online payment system (aka Google Checkout). You need to register your credit card with that in order to make purchases on Android. It serves as the 'authorized Payment Processor' in most case. Other ones being carrier billing on supported carriers.
I am using Ads in my App and also I am providing an option for users to upgrade via PayPal android api for Ad-Free app.
I could successfully integrate PayPal api for checkout in my app, but not getting how to tell to my app that this user has upgraded already/Now.
I want user to get ad-free app even after they re-installed the app.
Do I need to use my own server for tracking all upgrades or any other best practice is available.
Kindly help me out. Your reply is highly appreciated.
This will likely be against the TOS. As far as I know, you can only accept "donations" through other methods and not even that is clear. I have an app that accepted donations through paypal and afterwards I sent emails to those "donators" with an unlock code to remove the advertising. That didn't seem to break any terms of service, but I wouldn't write anything saying explicitly that the payment outside of google waller will give them an add free version.
"Google has been pressuring applications and mobile game developers to
use its costlier in-house payment service, Google Wallet for quite
some time. Now Google warned several developers in recent months that
if they continued to use other payment methods — such as PayPal, Zong
and Boku — their apps would be removed from Google Play. The move is
seen as a way to cut costs for Google by using their own system."
Source