I have a paid Android app that costs some $. I would like to make it free for a certain period of time. I.e. a promotional price of $0. In Google Play, there is an option to make an app free but when I check it, it says:
"Setting the price to Free is permanent; you cannot change to a price later."
That's certainly not what I want! After a week I want to set my original price back! So...
Q: How can I have a promotional price of $0 during, lets say, a week?
This is not possible due to potential ways to exploit the workings of the Google Play store (potentially skewing download counts, and such; a free app is more likely to get downloads, and those will boost its rankings before you make it cost money).
This has been asked before, and the consensus is that it's not possible by design. There are a few solutions in that thread, such as:
Make your app free, last one week, then have the user use in-app purchasing to continue using it. (Not sure if this is exactly what you hoped, but it's a potential way of monetizing regardless.)
Put up a free version, and take it down in a week. Users will have to reinstall the app to get the paid version but this would still have the same desired effect.
Do an update (or have a setting in your app that expires at a certain time) to remove the paid features after a week (this might tick off a lot of users, though).
Sadly, as I said, this is not possible, so you'll just have to work around it best you can.
I know this thread is old, but for those still looking for an answer, you could do something in the app that forces the user to buy the paid version after a week. Ex. Cerberus. You get a free trial for 6 days. After the time is up, each time you open the app, it takes you to the paid store listing. Just a tip.
Related
We are planning on changing our currently paid app, into a "free" (demo) app with in-app purchase to unlock the full game.
Our problem with making this transition is that we already have customers who've paid for the app. We therefore need to ensure that they wont have to pay for something they've already bought once. We have looked for every possible solution we can think of, but without luck.
Licensing is out of the question, as it will always return valid for free apps.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. As a fallback we'll have to create two apps, but we would much rather prefer to only keep a single one.
Regards
Jannek
Edit:
Thanks for the feedback. We didn't find a solution, but ended up using the first achievement to unlock the game by default. this covers 80% of our players. Unfortunately also 80% of the pirates. for the remaining 20% we setup a token server, where they can unlock the game by entering the last 8 digits from their purchase info.
This also allows us to give out promo codes on Google Play.
A couple of unsatisfying solutions:
Update the app before you make it free. Collect IDs somehow of people who use it and record them. Downside is it will miss people that rarely update or use your app.
Release the paid app as a new package. Convert the old one into a "pre-paid licence". You can detect whether the licence app is installed or not from the new one. Downside is you lose all your ratings and reviews.
I would like to migrate my app from a free/paid scheme to a free app with in-app-purchases.
I will be using the old free app, as the new free app with the in-app purchases, and I am looking for a way to make this transition.
How can I achieve this?
Is it possible with Google Play Licensing to retrieve the licensing information about another app still owned by the same developer account? Or you can only retrieve licensing information about the current app?
Otherwise, which other ways there could be to recognize a user being the owner of the paid app?
This is not possible due to potential ways to exploit the workings of the Google Play store (potentially skewing download counts, and such; a free app is more likely to get downloads, and those will boost its rankings before you make it cost money).
This has been asked before, and the consensus is that it's not possible by design. There are a few solutions in that thread, such as:
Make your app free, last one week, then have the user use in-app purchasing to continue using it. (Not sure if this is exactly what you hoped, but it's a potential way of monetizing regardless.)
Put up a free version, and take it down in a week. Users will have to reinstall the app to get the paid version but this would still have the same desired effect.
Do an update (or have a setting in your app that expires at a certain time) to remove the paid features after a week (this might tick off a lot of users, though).
Sadly, as I said, this is not possible, so you'll just have to work around it best you can.
Even the original question was asked long ago it is up-to-date for me now :)
I think about allowing paid features in the free app in case the (old) paid app is still present in the phone. You can check this using PackageManager.
i want to create a trial version app, but i couldn't find how to limit the app usage for a fixed time (say 15 days).
Is it possible using android LVL?
I would suggest you read the second answer of this thread.
I don't think you can and should want to release a free version with the same package as a future paid version : you won't be able to do so.
But the right solution, to my mind, is a different package with an other kind of security check that prevents the app from working after some time.
You want people to download freely your app then you have no choice exept saying your app is free, for every one, but this could be for a limited trial period (i.e berfor june 15)
Otherwise, I don't see how you could do to let people download it for free AND pay for licence.
Remember that if you choose to make a free app :
this leads a server policy manager to send a huge number as validity time stamp for the licence checker.
thus, when your app will become paid then you will never be able to say if your first users of free version converted... LVL will let your free users run the free version.
I kind of think something should be feasible by re writing a server managed policy and changing the validity when receiving it from server, but it seems to me LVL has not been meant for that and it would be a pity to loose some revenues...
Here is the code for servermanager, you could attempt to override setValidityTimestamp and give it an upper limit if licence is given for free.
But, again, the right solution, to my mind is a different package with an other kind of security check that prevents the app from working after some time.
Steff
I have a simple database driven app. I'm looking to offer a free and paid version. The only limitation in the free version, is that you're limited to adding 10 records per month.
What is the best way to handle upgrading from free to paid, while maintaining the database?
I had planned on using in-app billing to unlock the ability to store unlimited records/month but I think that is probably beyond complicated for my simple app.
Other ideas were to sell an unlocker app... I don't know if people get confused by this concept though or not.
I could always write the free db to an sd card and have the paid app copy it. But a concern is people without sd cards and it just seems like something would go wrong and somebody would lose their data.
Any thoughts on this?
If you don't want to use in-app billing then you need two separate packages, free/paid or free/unlocker. IMHO free/unlocker is far more convenient than the free/paid. In you choose free/paid you will end with two copies of the same app and you are going to have problems like the one you mention with the databases.
Android LVL is a no go in this case, you can use it to check licence and enable/disable the 10 records per month restriction, but you are limited to one package (meaning you will have the paid apk in the android market but for the "free" version you need to distrubute the application by your own).
I think PowerAMP offers a good solution. They have a free app that acts as a trial of their product and when the trial period ends, they show a dialog with a link to the unlocker app in the android market. You can use the same strategy, when a user tries to enter more than 10 records/month show them an alert with a link to the unlocker app. I think this should solve your concern about people getting confused.
I have read on the market support that "If you have previously published an application for free, you cannot change it to have a price."
But I was wondering, if at the contrary I change my app from payed to free and after some time I want to re change it from free to payed! Can I? And if yes, do I have to wait some period (I have read something like this in the contract)?
Tnk's
Valerio From Italy
You can change your app from paid to free, but the moment it's free, you can no longer start charging for it. It's a one-way street.
Why not just have two versions? One free and one paid. Then just post the version you want available and remove the other one.
As Daniel said, it's a one way thing.
If you do find yourself wanting to be able to charge again for some reason, it would be best to put adverts in (somewhere unobtrusive, I personally hate apps that try to trick you into clicking) and then publishing a second paid 'unlock' app. This app need to nothing other than exist, and the main app can check if it's installed using the Package Manager.
Alternatively you could lock out any future features using the same unlock idea. I wouldn't recommend locking out currently available features in this way however, as it looks bad, will upset your customers, and is quite possibly against the terms of the Android market.
Another consideration here is the users that already paid for it. I tackled this by making the app do a little more and have it check a list of users that I pulled from my purchase transactions.