On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:05 AM, Karsten Silz <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Jan 26, 11:39 pm, Moandji Ezana <[email protected]> wrote: > > > And I'm also not sure why Google will support another payment system > > > with carrier billing - they already have Google Checkout, why don't > > > they just roll that out in more countries instead? > > > > Clearly, Google isn't too great at selling stuff in lots of countries. If > > they can delegate that to someone else, they'll probably be able to roll > it > > out faster. > > The report said that "working with carriers to set up billing was both > expensive and time-consuming" - and you have to do that at least three > times per country, mostly four times. I can't imagine setting up > Google Checkout once per country being slower. > Well, there are still a lot of countries where you can't buy apps, so maybe the carrier billing route is quicker. I was also thinking of the limited availability of the Nexus One and Nexus S (which, I believe, is still US & UK only). > > Also, I believe PayPal has an Android library, so unless there's some > kind > > of restriction I'm not aware of, developers don't really need Google to > be > > able to do in-app purchases. And doesn't Google Checkout have an API that > > could be used anyway? > > This is all about convenience - not everybody who buys Android apps > has an PayPal account. And there's more to in-app purchasing than > just payment. On iOS, you can buy three different kind of goods: > consumables (like "10 pieces of gold to buy new items for my > character") that you use once, non-consumables that you can use > forever (like "ten new levels for the game") and subscriptions (like > "live sport scores for the 2010/2011 soccer season") that expire after > a while. Now these are tied to your iTunes account, so you can use > the non-consumables and subscriptions on every iOS device where you > run the app with the same iTunes account (up to five concurrently). Sure it's more convenient to have it built in, but technically there's nothing stopping developers (apart from time to set it up :) from using one or more existing payment options. And since there's no iTunes-like app, the sharing of "non-consumables and subscriptions" would have to be handled by the application itself anyway. Moandji -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" 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/javaposse?hl=en.
