We have a mobile app that is our main product.
We need to provide a different price (not just currency conversion) for it for each country store. As we found out (please let me know if this is wrong), the only way to do this is to upload the app separately on each country store (i.e. separate apps).
Is there an easy way to manage these uploads to the 10+ stores we're targeting. By managing I mean uploading the release itself on all needed country stores as well as monitoring all apps KPIs like number of installs.
When you upload an app in your Google Play Dev Console, click in Prices and Distribution form into the left menu, and then in Automatic conversion price form check "Overwrite existing prices". Now you can personalize your price by country.
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I am currently evaluating a mobile developer that I met online. He sent me a list of his published apps and there are a total of 33 apps in the list, mostly Native with a few in React Native.
The weird part is that every app I’ve checked so far has a different developer name and none of them match the personal name of the developer. (Yes, he could publish under a business name but one of the apps is (C) Aston Martin.)
Am I reading too much into this or is it actually as fishy as it smells?
To answer your title :
Yes, it is possible provided the publisher have enough resources.
There might be a few reason for a developer to publish the apps under different names/developer/publisher.
The apps are developed for different clients, thus they would want to separate out the publishing to store (PlayStore or AppStore) part, so that when the clients decide they want to use the services of other publisher etc, the current publisher could just hand over the accounts related to that client. Such as emails, store accounts, hosting accounts, and possibly even bank and credit card account which could have been made under the client's company name to begin with. And it also allows the clients to handle the informations of the Apps at the store themselves easier.
The company, for one reason or another does not want the published apps to be easily traced back to the same company. Maybe because of tax-evasion, privacy issues, or simply because the content of the apps is not totally legal to be distributed in the country where the developer is operating from.
But considering your description of "evaluating a mobile developer that I met online." There are a few possibilities that the apps are published under different names
The apps are build while he is working under different companies.
The apps he listed are apps that uses one/few libraries that he made.
He was working under freelance jobs for company(ies) that in the end developed the apps for those companies published separately.
He was simply lying that those are his apps to get your approval, since you can't really trace back so many step without a legal court request to the store (PlayStore and AppStore) to know that he is really the one developing it.
One easy way to validate for PlayStore is to have them send you an email (or a few) using the registered email address at the bottom of the PlayStore listing page of the apps for one or few of the apps.
For example Facebook Lite's would be lite-android-support#fb.com.
But if they are working under another company, or such, they would not have access to the said email address, and you would have to ask them to provide other ways to validate their relations to the projects listed.
I am trying to use the getSkuDetails() method to get the currency code: https://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_reference. However the privacy_currency_code is always USD. I tried to things:
(1) VPN to another country from my PC and create a google account, then add that account to test device
(2) VPN the test phone to another country
But in both cases the privacy_currency_code in getSkuDetails is still USD, so why that happens? In the play store console the in-app product is marked with USD. Not sure if that's the cause. If that's the cause why it doesn't automatically convert?
In Play Console have you mark the SKU available for non-US countries? If not, then it defaults to US price.
Also, Google Play allows you to change the country but be aware there is a long cool down of 1 year
https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7431675?hl=en
Download a vpn, select another country in your phone and create a google account. (important to create a new account, otherwise google "knows" where you are from)
Go to settings, apps, google play, clear cache.
Open your app.
After changing your vpn to another country, clear play store cache. dont need to create one account per country.
Is it possible to get product price in local currency from the app itself. For example if I am selling Product1 with price of 1$ through Google Play In App billing. A customer from UK clicks on a button to purchase the product and the price at Google Play is shown in GBP. Can I get localized price in the app from Google Play so I can display it to the customer in its own currency?
The in-app billing v3 claims to be able to accomplish this:
The API also introduces a long-anticipated feature: the ability to query in-app product information directly from Google Play. Developers can now programmatically obtain an item's title, description and price. No currency conversion or formatting is necessary: prices are reported in the user's currency and formatted according to their locale
Source: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/12/in-app-billing-version-3.html
Since you are asking this i suggest to just leave as it is.
This is more about economy rather than programming, and the problem is that the ratio between 2 currencies keeps changing every time and there is no way to calculate this because of the market and the actual evaluation is only given by the stock markets for a particular point in time.
There are 2 ways of thinking about this:
The merchant makes an evaluation about what is the average ratio between 2 currencies, he quantifies this value in real money and adds it to the final price, so he can avoid money loss or at least a good part of it
The merchant puts in place a mechanism for prices that, given real-time infos from the stock markets ( probably you have to pay for this ), calculates prices of real goods in real time or every time that the user wants to checkout his order.
If this is new to you don't say nothing about this, there are a lots of money that are burning and magically appearing every day in every stock exchange market, if you give a bad advice to your client he can be really disappointed and lose a lot of money.
Also different currencies are usually handled directly by credit card services, there is no reason to handle this by yourself, you can only risk more than it's worth doing it.
If your users wants to know the price in their currency teach them to use Google or some reliable online currency converter.
I'm having a little trouble with in app purchases. My app downloads a JSON file to get the skus of available products. That way I don't have to update my code when I add a new product. So when the user makes a purchase, it sends that sku to Google Play. That works. The question is, how can I retrieve the product information from Google Play to show the user the title and description of the products? I know you can export a CSV from Google play, but you have to be logged in to do that. surely there is a better way.
thanks!
Since end of 2012 Android supports the in app billing version 3.
Using this, you can simply run getSkuDetails with one or multiple SKU (your identifiers) and it will return you for example the price, title and description.
You’ll need to store the product information (such as name, description, etc.) on your own, either within your app or on an external server.
I am in the process of creating an in-app-billing service. I want to set prices differently for different countries.
When the purchase page is displayed, how can I decide which currency i should use for an In-app-billing item? Do I use the local currency? Or the Android Market Account currency? I could not find any documentation about this. I want to know the rule of judgment to display the correct currency.
See this question and the corresponding answers:
Android Market In-App-Purchase: How to get the currency a user will pay in?
In summary, it's not possible (at the time of my writing this!) to talk to Android Market and get the currency of the user's Android Market account.
Maybe an idea to have a Spinner in your shop screen which allows the user to select the currency to display prices in. Bit of a hack but best alternative I could come up with.