I would like to distribute the beta for my Android App to 10,000 specific people that signed up for the prerelease via the Play Store for free. Keeping in mind that the app will eventually be a paid application, is this specificity possible?
If your app has licensing enabled, you can add the people who should get it for free in a "whitelist" with their google play account , so that the app would appear as bought from the market. (i know it is possible but never did it... just google it)
After that you can distribute the apk through email (try http://thebetafamily.com/supersend/ )
and for the previously added accounts the licensing check will pass, and for other users the licensing check will fail if they did not bought the app from market.
This was just a suggestion, never had to do something like this , but thought this might help !
It's not possible. Google Play does not allow paid application to be given away for free (minimum price is ~$1).
You can do it other way:
Publish your application free
For premium features request some in-app payment
Implement in your application some piece of code to unlock premium features to specific users.
I have found a library for it: https://code.google.com/p/remoteunlockerlib/ But not sure if it works at this moment :)
Related
I'm thinking of releasing a "PRO" (ad-free) version for my android application and I'm worried that the apk would be shared on blogs/crack sites for free distribution
is there a way to add some kind a purchase check? Since the app will be available for purchase only, there should be a way to check the user's purchase history maybe?
If the user hasn't purchased the app and is using it the app would show a message that they haven't bought it properly and would shut down.
The thing that you are looking for is the App Licensing. Here is the link that can help you.
How can I implement Google Play Licensing for an Android app?
I have an application that I want to release for $x amount to the public, however, I want to allow the Google Developer Console Alpha/Beta APK to be downloaded for free. I want the testers to be able to download it for free? How do I do that?
Thanks in advance,
PS. I could swear I found the link on Google, but I can't seem to find it again.
Here is my conclusion (in short, no solution):
1- (Edit: unfortunately this point is not correct, you wont get the updates unless you download directly from the store.) The only issue is delivering the first APK to the testers, as they wont be able to download the application from the Play Store, however, downloading updates from the Play Store is doable and okay, (delivered APK must be signed with same key as Play Store APK).
2- If the application is never publicly released yet, testers must have some sort of a direct link to the application on the Play Store, as searching for it will never show up (even with package name: com.example.application). But after having the first APK, you can just look through the 'My Apps" section in the Play Store and find it.
3- Google sucks for not making this easier, especially given the triviality of the concept and the need for it.
Thanks everyone for your suggestions. But considering none of them were the answer, because there is no answer, I had to sum up my findings here.
Cheers.
After discussing this with a Google representative I found that there is a round-about way of offering the app for free to testers. The tester must initially pay for the app. However, it turns out that refunds initiated by the developer actually behave differently than those initiated by Google.
Google refund: License is revoked and the user will no longer have access to the app.
Developer refund: License is NOT revoked, the app will remain fully functional IF you are only testing for license response. If you verify Order IDs it will fail since the order status will have changed (this would be a custom implementation). For developers who implemented the recommended license verification example this would effectively yield a free app.
Caveat: I haven't tested this yet as my app is a couple months from release, but here's my chat:
me
Ok can you please explain the refund then. As I understood it a refund would deauthorize the user's license, so I assumed you meant refund outside of the Google payment system.
Artemis
If you yourself initiate the refund, the user will not lose access to the app in their library.
Unless you have designed your app to constantly check the order ID's status to trigger the revoke action or the like.
If a user initiate's a refund through Google, yes, they will no longer have the app in their library and they will lose access to the content.
me
OK, since I only check the license response from the server any refund I initiate will yield a fully functional and free app in the user's library?
Artemis
Well, I am unable to validate your app's code or what you have done in its design.
I am only able to confirm that if you refund a user's purchase for an app, that Google will not revoke the app from their library or their access to the app's content.
me
Excellent, perhaps I missed the documentation on this somewhere, but I searched quite thoroughly and most information states that the developer can NOT offer the app for free to testers.
This would be great information to add to the developer console help and the testing pages.
Artemis
That is true, you cannot offer the app as free to testers.
The app must be paid for, no matter what.
However, as with all apps, alpha, beta, or production, you are welcome to refund your users however you would like.
The google play developer console now give developers the chance to provide promotion codes offering a free app or free in-app purchases, perfect for providing a free app to Alpha and Beta users:
I want to be able to get the state of the user purchases but on the current app they are in from when it was paid to free.
For example App SuperCars was paid app but the latest update makes it free with in-app purchases. I want previous users who paid for the app to have access to paid content but new users to have no access in which they would need to pay.
Can anyone give me an example of how I would do this? How do I get the user paid sate??
After looking around and contacting certain people I've found out that it's not supported by Google, I'm disappointed at the developing Apps for Google Play, lots of features still missing.
Think about it, essentially you have launched a new product. Its not the same product, its a modified more useful product. Infact you should release this as a different product, different package, and check if your other product is also installed. If yes, provide the in app features free. Let both products coexist.
One more way is to update the older product (with a bug fix) that broadcasts its "paid" status. Then when you install the new app (free with inapp purchases) you can know that they have already paid for the app.
But if they have uninstalled the older app, then they have to install the older app to use it free.
So essentially you customers have 2 choices
Install the older product, pay for it. And install and use the 2nd product free.
Install the newer product and use in-app purchases.
DONT look for a way for google play to give you a status of a user's paid progress of a previous version of the app. Sorry, this looks like a crazy api to implement (even for google :)).
I have a paid app in the Play Store (Profile Widget, in case anyone is wondering ;)) and I want to allow some users (friends, or people who do not have a credit card) to download it for free.
Of course I could just send them the APK, but they wouldn't get the updates automatically, and with every update to the app I would have to send them all the APK file again. And also, by using this method, anyone that had access to the APK file would be able to install the app for free.
I saw that by using the Android Licensing Library you could make some users bypass the License Check, but I want the app to show as "Purchased" for them in the Play Store, and I don't think this would do it.
I searched Stack Overflow but none of the solutions I found (like creating a separate APK and checking for its existence from the "real" app) handled the auto-update part.
Has anyone found a good solution for this?
Thanks in advance!
You can now generate and distribute promo codes to current and new users on Google Play to drive engagement. Under the Promotions tab in the Developer Console, you can set up promo codes for your apps, games, and in-app products to distribute in your own marketing campaigns (up to 500 codes per app, per quarter). Consider using promo codes to reward loyal users and attract new customers.
Reference:
1) http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2016/01/create-promo-codes-for-your-apps-and-in.html
2) https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6321495
The best solution is to have them buy the app, then refund their purchase. It would still show up as paid. Alternatively, you could give them the app, and license it via the LVL, and configure their email addresses as test accounts listing as purchased., but then they won't get updates.
I have the same problem, I've checked and from what I can see there is no analog to the Apple system (Give out a one-use code to download the app).
If you just give them the APK you don't get Crash/ANRs from them and they won't automatically get updates.
It is something that Google really do need to fix, sorry there isn't a better option.
(I have the same problem for my own device (you can't buy your own app), I had a crash that was rare in the app on my own phone, but I couldn't reproduce it at a computer and the logs had well cycled past the error by the time I did, Being able to get the crash report through the developer console would have saved me a lot of mucking around)
this is an updated and no credit card method.
You can create a free version of the same app in the play store,
but publish it in alpha release.
Then, you can create a google+ provate group of alpha testers and set it as the tester group for the alpha version.
Now add the 'free licensed' users to the alpha testing group and they have your free app.
To push updates, you will have to upload updates also to the 'free alpha', that's not gold, but I think is pretty close to the best you can get at the moment
This method has an issue. As long as licensing is per-App, you will have a different license key, and it may always return TRUE, so if the users share the apks, they may be able to let other people use the app, not totally sure about this occurrence, but you are warned, better if you are sharing the free app to trusted users.
You can set up a sale at price zero for the paid app and let your contacts know about it. Google allows up to 8 days of the sale at a time, but you can also set it up for a single day. This way, you may still get a few downloads from unintended recipients, but the 'problem' will be far more controlled than if you were to mail out APKs. Other problems like updates are also solved automatically.
You can upload in third party app stores like Amazon App Store, Aptoide , www.proapk.in to allow users to download paid Android apps for free.
For downloading the app as a developer: Google Playstore's official word on this, is that you must create a 2nd google account to download the app you are listed as developer for. That way the stats for downloads and terms are not breached. Spoke about same issue today (though its a while after the question was posted, others should see this with similar issues)
For giving it away free: Can't you just change the app to free at a given time then notify those people to hit it during a certain window?
Using the Android LVL for making the application licensed and paid is clearly given.
I still have doubts regarding the free trial , like if i give 30 days free trial but if user changes the date (puts a previous date on device). will it still be available for that total free 30 trial days or will it continue?
Any suggestions to handle that?
Another issue arises that if I want to give my application free of cost to some , how can that be handled if they download it from the google play / market?
There is no built-in support for trial usage in the Android LVL.
There is one way to give out paid apps for free while using the Android LVL and Google Play Store. Go to the Android Developer Console and then click Edit Profile. In the licensing and in-app billing section, enter the Google-associated email addresses of the users you want to give your app to in the "Test Accounts" section. Set the License Test Response to LICENSED. This will now allow you to send the same LVL-containing app APKs that you upload to the Google Play Store to reviewers without requiring them to purchase the app.
Two important notes on using this method:
Users in this list are given access to all of your paid apps and all in-app paid content for free.
If you are using a ServerManagedPolicy, the LICENSED response issued to Test Accounts has a very short license validity period (I believe 1 minute) and a maximum allowable retry count of 0.
The Google Play store does not support trials. You can implement it yourself by storing the usage start date somewhere. If you store it on the device, any user with a rooted device will be able to reset it. You can obfuscate it somewhat to make it harder. You can also store it on a server, but you need some info from the device to associate it with.
Giving apps for free is also not supported. You can develop it yourself if you have some sort of a server and use in-app purchases to enable premium features in a free app. If you want to use paid app, the only way is to actually send people the APK.