C H A P T E R  7

In-App Billing: Putting a Store in Your Application

In Chapter 5, I discussed how an application can have its own store for more applications, and this is one more way that the developer can make profits apart from the initial price and advertising.

Now I am going to suggest ways in which you can make some more money by putting another type of market within your own application. In-app billing is only a recent addition to the Android Market, and it can offer the user premium features, unlocked content, and downloads, as well as upgrades and expansion packs. Combined with the free application method mentioned in the previous chapter, your application will follow the “freemium” business model, a method that has been working on many software fronts since the 1980s.

Remember in Chapter 6 how I pointed out that many free apps don’t make it easy for the user to obtain the paid version? The same happens for in-app purchases. Many applications do not mention them on the splash screen, but you might want to put them in the description of the application on the market itself. How you want to peddle them within your application is up to you, but like I said in the last chapter (and the one before that), timing is everything. Don’t hound the users with constant requests to buy your in-app virtual goods, or you will have fewer users. If you have a home screen menu, it will be very beneficial to make your in-app store one of the selections on it.

Your in-app purchases should be designed to complement the application itself, but users should be able to operate the application without them. Remember the analogy in the last chapter about the free samples at the grocery store? This is the same type of thing, except you get your users to love your application so much that they would be willing to pay for a little (or a lot) of something extra. Pricing is a little tricky in the realm of Android. Apple’s in-app sales use a tier system starting at $0.99, which is then converted to local currency for the international market. Android doesn’t have any tiers, but there is a currency conversion. You will have to figure out how it will best work for you.