I have an app that displays cartoon characters. I wanted to start to offer additional characters, or even have accessories to place on the characters.
Can anyone offer advice as to the best way to do that?
Can that be done through the app store, or do I need to have my own mechanism for downloading them?
I have seen many apps where you can download clothes, etc. by touching an icon in the app, but I have not yet found any documentation or tutorials.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
You can use In-App-Purchases for that. Apple will handle the financial side of things (charging the user through iTunes) and you'll have to handle the rest (downloading or unlocking the new content).
See the documentation: Selling with In-App Purchase
And this tutorial: Introduction to In-App Purchases
Related
I need to integrate in-app purchase for downloadable content in my app. I am trying to display list of different player characters which can be downloaded or unlocked after purchasing the character from in-app purchase module.
Can you guys point me to proper tutorial or provide me any possible hint?
You can have a pretty good base here:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/21081/introduction-to-in-app-purchases-in-ios-6-tutorial
You can also check the Apple's documentation whenever you need. :)
I am planning to develop a free app. Which could be useful for many people. So, I am planning to put a donate button inside my app. So if any people finds it useful, they will donate for development.
Is it good if we implement in app purchase to achieve this functionality.
I am not sure is this possible. Please correct me if this question is wrong and I will remove it.
Thank you in advance.
Try to search. There are multiple questions on how to handle donations.
You have to look for App Store Review Guidelines
https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guidelines.html
See 11.2 - 11.4 and judge if donation to non-charities (Charities covered in 12) are allowed:
I would say no. This is virtual goods not consumed inside the App.
To work around it, let people pay for a different background color or some minor functionality such that you can stay in compliance. Or make 2 versions, telling them to support development by buying the other version (you can link to it). The 2 versions could probably be the same or almost the same.
We are wanting to modify our app and create a way to allow mobile users to shop at our store. I know apple get's 30% of the revenue from the App sales itself, but do they get 30% of the sales made through our app? If so, Would we be better off making an ecommerce website designed for mobile users and then making a link to that page from our app? If we do that, would Apple still get a portion of our revenue? Thanks for the help.
Yep, same 70/30 finding a link now...
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-lets-iphone-app-developers-sell-stuff-in-free-apps-2009-10
Now this is just using apple's in-app APIs. If you just have people buy stuff through your store from the app but bypassing Apple they get no cut.
EDIT::
Actually here is a better answer:
http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/business-legal-app-store/60030-will-apple-take-commission-app-sells-goods-within-app.html
Yeah, they're not keen on you selling things out with their store because yes, they do want your 30%. I think newspapers and magazines are currently battling with them over some sort of subscription that works similar to this but for now you're unlikely to get this through the net.
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Amazon and a few others get around this by having a buy button that launches their website in Mobile Safari, where you can sell items without any Apple involvement.
As far as I know, Apple takes 30% of the price of the app in the store, not the revenue generated through it. How could they keep track of this revenue?
This just saves time.
Since I already have a web applciation.
I can just stick it inside a webview.
The question is: Does it turn off many users? How many users will be disgusted that the entire iPhone app is written in WebView?
I think it's pretty safe to say that most iPhone users are expecting apps to use the power of the iPhone, not just be a portal to a mobile website.
Think about facebook mobile compared to iPhone facebook app. If you're an iPhone user, I'm assuming you'd much rather use the app than a mobile version of the site (or mobile version of the site contained in a WebView in a an app).
That being said, depending on your app, if the mobile version of your app is highly usable, it could be okay...
Just my thoughts...
John Gruber on Daring Fireball just wrote about this today.
From a usability perspective, native apps usually feel better. They may also be more responsive and handle large amounts of data more gracefully. I have a few so-called "apps" on my devices which are just glorified Web apps, and they don't necessarily scream quality.
If you've already done your app, then just ship it. But keep your mind open to feedback from your users.
The answer is almost certainly "no". People care far more about the usability and experience of interacting with your application than what API-supplied widget you use to render it.
I read Apple has begun removing apps that are like this. Well technically, they remove apps they think could be easily implemented as a webapp instead. Yours obviously qualifies ;)
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/07/apple-cookie-cutter-apps/
EDIT: Apple seems to not mind, according to the Human Interface Guidelines:
If you have a webpage or web application, you might choose to use a web view to implement a simple iPhone application that provides a wrapper for it.
Of course, Apple has a tendency to contradict themselves. ;)
Apple human interface guidelines says this isn't even allowed. I forget where it comes from, but somewhere in the guideline it says apps that are only web views are not allowed. I'm about 95% sure I've seen this. Can anyone confirm?
I was considering developing an application which would:
1) form part of a suite of similar applications; and
2) allow the user to download additional chargeable content.
I would be extremely grateful if somebody could point me in the direction of any resources where this approach is discussed programatically and practically (i.e. Apple's requirements for doing so as well as code samples outlining the appproach).
I think what you have in mind is In App purchases, you can start with the in app purchase guide from Apple and the quick start guide. I've implemented this and found it very effective and fairly simple to implement.
Programmatically it uses the StoreKit framework which is described in the guide I posted above.
If you want to address the suite of apps you can also run ads that cross promote them, I've seen admob used for this it has an in-house ad feature that allows you to serve ads for your own applications for free across your own apps.
You can charge for additional content with In App Purchases. After reading Apple's In App Purchase Guide as recommended by paulthenerd, you can also check out ilime.com and urbanairship.com. These are services which make In App Purchases easier to implement.