I have a website which sells a product to the user (downloadable). I am creating an iPhone app and want to be able to sell some of the products using the 3.0's in-app purchase.
Now the documentation mentions that anything you want to sell has to be uploaded to iTunes Connect and approved by Apple. But I want to be able to keep adding products to be sold by my app on a daily basis.
I have a web service to get the list of products from the website. Is it possible to include in-app purchase to let user buy this stuff from within the app but without having to add them to iTunes Connect?
As I understand it, no - all the things you want to sell via in-app purchase run through a vetting process similar to that of the apps themselves. Apple won't allow, for example, a "photo of the day" application if you can in-app purchase pornographic photos to be sent to you daily.
What you could probably do is submit your app with a backlog of in-app purchases, five or six days ahead of time, then consistently be submitting your daily items ahead of when you want them to be available. Not sure how reliable the review process is, or whether this will work for your situation - just a thought.
Nekin,
I think you have to use the type as consumable (in app purchase) product as each time the product has to be purchased. Once you purchase a book, then you can mark it as purchased in your local app database and that way the user need not buy the same book as you can check it in the local app database before connecting to the in app purchase payment request and this way the inapp purchase products can be dynamic and can use as many books but the list of books should be from your server.
You can keep updating the server data with more number of books.
Thanks,
Vijay
Related
I am using MK in-App Purchase and I want to make an application that have (let's say some books) and the books are getting added over time and each book the user have to buy it individually so how can I add with every book in-app purchase key for it without make an update for it.
I can't figure out a way so I need a step by step or a link for a tutorial for that.
I'm not sure if this would be the best way to set this up but if you are selling the books at certain price tiers (e.g. 1.99, 2.99, etc) I would set up a number of In App Purchases to reflect each price tier. Then when the user purchases a book match the appropriate tier to the book purchased.
You can set these up using the tutorial you already linked to in your question.
You will need to update your current app to accept in-app purchases and process them accordingly. After adding support for in-app purchases, you will need to re-submit your updated app to Apple.
I have personally used UrbanAirship in several of my projects. They offer tutorials on how to implement their in-app purchase solution into your app, which is quite easy.
We want to sell digital content through subscription model in our app. Is it possible to support a subscription bundle? Let's say content in question is magazine subscription for $0.99 a month. Is it possible to support a bundle of subscription such that user can subscribe to any three magazine by buying a bundle for let's say $1.99? Or is it possible to support eat-all-you-can model - $3.99 for subscribing to all magazines in our app?
According to the official documents from Apple, yes you can. What you need to do is design your iAP store and items according to Apple's requirements.
Getting Started with In App Purchase
on iPhone OS (Version 2.0)
...
Subscriptions
Subscriptions and subscription
renewals to content or services can be
offered to customers for purchase. You
can offer customers the opportunity to
renew their content or service
subscriptions using In App Purchase,
but be sure to define a reasonable
renewal frequency to avoid bothering
users with unwelcome reminders. Be
aware that you are responsible for
both tracking subscription expirations
and for renewal billing; the App Store
does not monitor subscription duration
and does not offer an automatic
billing mechanism. Be sure to indicate
when an item is a subscription when
entering its product information into
iTunes Connect.
Both of these features are supported, they are called consumable and non-consumable in-app purchases.
I'm considering posting an app to the iphone app store, but I'm curious before I start paying them for the priviledge of posting the app, whether they provide instant payment notification to a url?
Generally, I've used paypal in the past for applications where right after payment my web site is secretly notified of a purchase. I take this notification, with the users email address and product purchased, to send the purchaser information required for the application.
Is this possible with apple? With the iphone app store? What about the upcoming mac store?
thx
No. Apple handles all contact with the customer, including delivery of the app. At the end of each day, week and month they give you summaries of sales of each product in each country. It's nothing like selling with PayPal. The iOS and Mac App Store are exactly the same in this regard.
The nearest you can get is having your app connect to your server when it first runs, although if you're doing this for no other reason than to track your users, you'll have to check it's allowed under the developer agreement.
First, no, you do not receive instant notification. You can grab a daily report on the web the following early morning (in the US), you can use the free app that Apple provides to retrieve the information, or you can use a variety of third-party tools to do the same.
Second, you will never receive any information whatsoever about the people who buy your app, so no, you can't send purchasers anything.
The Mac App Store appears to use the exact same arrangements.
If you use in-app purchase, you can get an instant notification to your server for the in-app purchase, but not for the initial download of the app.
If you just place a paid app in Apple's App store, you get no direct sales or customer information of any kind, only after-the-fact daily and weekly sales trend estimates, and monthly sales reports a few weeks later. Then Apple then pays you 70% of what they reported up to 45 days after the monthly close. You don't pay them. They pay you. And with over 300K apps in their store, and no other store doing anywhere near as well, they need no privileges granted from any developer. It's more like take it or leave it.
We have developed an application that allows a user to download audio content. The use of application itself is free, but we charge for the content. In our current business model, we accept payments using premium-rated SMS (which increases the in-app user's balance), however, Apple rejects the app since they do not allow this model for their applications.
Is there any other way (except In App Purchase API) we can accept the payments with?
Apple will only accept in-app purchases for this type of business model. Even then, you still have to submit each and every "in-app update" for approval at least a week prior.
Like Liam said, they want their piece of the pie too and they also don't want people slipping something past them (for instance, highly offensive content, pornography, etc.)
Per Apple:
You can create In App Purchases on both Free and Paid applications. Every product you want to offer in your store must first be registered with the App Store through iTunes Connect. When you register a product, you provide a name, description, and pricing for your product, as well as other metadata used by the App Store and your application.
There's no other way with this type of business model. More info here around page 116
Another option would be offering the same service via an ordinary website and then offer the app to allow users accessing their existing accounts. Take dropbox as an example - they offer paid memberships which you purchase on their website. The dropbox app itself is free but lets you access your dropbox account, for which you paid elsewhere.
In your case maybe you could offer "credits" for purchase (payable by premium-rated SMS) on your services website which the user could then spend by accessing his account from within the app.
This is less "direct" (requires the user to visit your website to pay for the content he will download later) and I wouldn't even bet on apple's approval (if the website appears to be merely a place for buying credits without further functionality, they'll propably reject the app too for circumventing in-app purchase), but then again, there are (propably) no alternatives. However, I'd talk with apple about this option before implementing it, to avoid wasting time and money. After all, in-app purchase is the way apple wants people to go if they want to spontaneously purchase content using only their device, so they'll defend it.
The easiest was to look at this is to work out why they refused the application, which is because it is not in their interest. You are selling a product to their customer and they are not getting any commission. In order for them to accept the app I would imagine that you will need to provide an in app purchase mechanism, but you could do this in addition to the Premium SMS as long as the app doesn't send the message
I am making an in-app purchase application for bulk of quizzes. I have all the information, graphics and data set of quizzes on my server. I want user to purchase quizzes with in-app purchase and want to transfer all the related content of purchased item from my server to application.
Now, apple is asking me to submit binary while adding in-app purchase item. Is this compulsory? For all kind of products (Consumable, Nonconsumable & Subscriptions)?
What if I want to manage the contents(graphics, database for that quiz product) of the product on my server not on itunes connect?
Help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
You don't have to submit binaries. In fact, it's not even possible. In-app purchases only have a product ID, a description and a price.
Also, be aware that you can't send new application code to the device via your web server. Only data can be sent.