I use the Android Market to offer paid upgrade apps from free apps myself. It doesn't work well. For one thing, you are never sure if launching a Market intent for a paid app will even work. The user might be in a country or on a carrier that doesn't support it. Checking against a country list before showing a market intent button to a user leaves you with list of countries you have to maintain and isn't even bullet proof when maintained properly because sometimes there are carriers that don't support paid apps in countries that otherwise do.
There are other problems as well. I get emails from users who can't get downloads to start, for example. A common problem with the Market app that hasn't been fixed in a long time. I generally give them a link to that Google "support" page where Google does nothing and there's pages and pages of users trying bizarre workarounds like resetting their Google Talk connections. Hopefully Amazon will make more money off their market and be more inclined to fix ridiculous situations and bugs like this. I don't even want to sell paid one shot upgrades delivered separately anyway. I'd much rather have a free, expansive game that just offers repeatable shortcuts to people willing to pay to help support it. E.g. the game would be free, let's call it "MyMineCraft". After each day- night cycle a store would pop up where a user could choose to buy an item that would otherwise take them a lot of trouble to obtain, like a titanium pick axe. It would break after a while and they could either buy another one, or they could buy a subscription and get one "free" item from the store per day. The whole purchase mechanism could be made much more painless for users if you didn't have to leave the app and download something through the Market. You can't do this sort of thing with PayPal either. They've explicitly said that the Android Market policy prevents you from selling digital content using it: https://www.x.com/message/176744 There are many game developers who would prefer to have enhanced subscriber experiences or purchasable digital goods options built-in to their free apps instead of as paid apps. These ways of making money are huge hits in the industry. I'm amazed Android has such poor support for them. No wonder a recent presentation I saw someone from Flurry give showed so many more developers writing for iOS than Android. On Oct 3, 5:40 pm, Doug <[email protected]> wrote: > On Oct 2, 5:51 pm, Lance Nanek <[email protected]> wrote: > > > The lack of users on alternative app stores is a big disadvantage. > > Still, if they had a method for in app purchases, including of > > expendable virtual goods and of extra subscription services, that is > > super easy for users to use, I'd probably use their store. Selling > > unlock apps like we have to on Google Market is a pain for the user > > and developer both, and limited in what it can do. > > Many developers, including myself, maintain both free and paid > versions of an app on the market. It's not great, but it's not that > much trouble, and mostly boils down to following a procedure on your > end to build each version. > > If you need to sell something in your app other than the app itself, > you can use PayPal X, which has an Android SDK. > > https://www.x.com/community/ppx/xspaces/mobile -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
