Question

In-App Billing / In-App Purchase

I’m developing an app for both Android and iOS.

I noticed that both have In-App Billing service.

I’m worried about the expiration dates of the extras people can buy in-app.

I know you can bill for an extra monthly and yearly, but let’s say I want the user to buy an extra and the expiration date is 1 day. Is it possible?

Which are the allowed expiration dates?

Another question (haven’t digged much yet) is about iOS In-App-Purchase, is it like Android’s one? What are the main differences (if any)?

And yet another question, are there any fees that Google and Apple apply on the extras?
Edit: I found out that there exists 30% fees for both of them, meh…

Thanks!

Answer 1

you have a lot of questions I’ll try to answer all of them.

The way to set up an expiration date of 1 day is to manage the user entitlement on your end. This means that you can pretty much do whatever you want and you simply use Google/Apple for billing. In Google – you should look for “unmanaged” products. In Apple “consumable” would give you the most flexibility. Going in that route is slightly more complicated as you need to set up a way to track what the user purchased and when does it expire.

There are a few differences between Apple and Android in-app purchase. Generally, Google are a bit more flexible and Apple give you slightly better tools. Unmanaged product in Android is the same as consumable in Apple and Managed is the equivalent of non-consumable.

Regarding the fees – 30% is their cut indeed. The only situation in which the fee is avoided is if you sell vouchers somewhere else (online or offline) and the user brings a voucher code to the app. This is true as long as the app doesn’t refer users (i.e. link) to the site selling vouchers.