Question

In my application i want to implement Subscription service. Subscription will be mostly yearly. After subscription expiration application should ask for subscription renewal and go for payment and checkout process.

I checked for Android Licensing and in-app billing but i couldn’t found any thing help full that i can use in my case as there i found that “Currently, Android Market doesn’t support subscription billing. Please note that collecting payments through your application is not allowed under the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement.” on this link http://www.google.com/support/androidmarket/developer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=140504.

How can i implement subscription and payment process in my application?

Please help me out.

Thank You.

Answer 1

I would do the following:

• Sell the subscription through the in-app purchase. When the user actually purchase it, you bill them for the first year, and note down the purchase data on your datastore (local or on the server side).
• Before the year ends, you alert the user to purchase the next year’s “subscription”, and do the same.

This has the disadvantage of making it very easy for the user to not pay the next year’s fee, but who want’s to be evil anyway.

An alternative would be to use the subscription through PayPal (http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/19/paypal-launches-in-app-payment-library-for-android/), but I have never used their service, and do not know its status w.r.t. Android Market’s Terms. (see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2787738/paypal-as-in-app-payment-model-in-android)