I was wondering if anyone has any experience selling apps through the Android, iPhone and Windows Phone market places using a subscription (recurring) payment model?
I have the requirement to develop a cross platform WP7, iPhone, Android application for a health and fitness company. The company wishes to sell the app as a monthly subscription, rather like you would a gym membership. It will be delivering personalised workout and nutrition advice to users as they progress through the programme.
I’ve read that iPhone supports directly a subscription model for content-delivery apps, e.g. newsreaders, that android supports in-app payments however Windows Phone doesn’t seem to support anything like this. So, my question is:
- Is something like recurring payments natively supported by any or all of the three main marketplaces?
- If not, is there a workaround? Like prompting the user to renew monthly or quarterly and processing a new payment? Any comments / suggestions welcome.
- Finally, what caveats should I be aware of with the three main marketplace hosts? I’ve heard horror stories of companies blacklisted for processing payments outside of the marketplace agreements.
The Windows Phone application policy states
Your application must be fully functional when acquired from Windows
Phone Marketplace (except for additional data as permitted below).
Unless you have a pre-existing billing relationship with the user,
your application may not require the user to provide payment
information, within the application experience, to activate, unlock,
or extend usage of the application.
However this paragraph seems to be ambigious. If anyone has any further information on this specifically I would appreciate it!
Finally, I have found some third party payment processors which claim to allow subscription payments through cloud services, e.g.
Again appreciate anyone who has had experience with using a similar method to achieve a subscription or recurring payment, even one driven by the user.
Best regards,
As told by a Microsoft rep yesterday:
The only way to do this on Windows Phone will be to redirect the user to a website and take the payment there. It’s not permitted to take payment details directly within an app.