In-App Purchasing for Amazon and Samsung App Stores

During the last 2.5 months I have been working on extending in-app purchasing (IAP) feature to apps distributed through Amazon Appstore and Samsung Apps Store. I am excited to work on such a ‘hot’ topic. A quick introduction :

What is in-app purchasing?

With in-app purchasing you can sell digital goods (lives/bullets/extra levels to a game, access to a service etc) from within your app.

Why to use IAP in my app?

There are various ways to make money from your app. All of them fall into one of the following three categories:

1. Charge users for downloading your app (paid model)
2. Offer your app for free and charge for additional/premium features (free with IAP)
3. Charge for both the app and additional features (paid with IAP)

It seems that the “freemium” (i.e. free app with IAP) business model is proved to be the most profitable with the largest revenue shares :

source : Distimo Publication – February 2014

What will change in the existing Livecode API for in-app purchasing?

The Livecode engine currently supports in-app purchasing for apps distributed through the Google Play Store (formerly Android Market), as well as the Apple AppStore. This support will now be extended so that apps distributed through other avenues (the Amazon & Samsung app stores) can make use of the in-app purchase features provided. For this reason, new LiveCode commands, functions and messages will be added. However, all of the existing (IAP-related) commands and functions will still be supported (for Google Play Store and Apple AppStore).

Why is this important?

From the developer’s point of view, being able to distribute a freemium app from multiple channels, means higher revenue. Moreover, they do not have to worry about how each store-specific IAP API works, since the same code will work across all stores. All they have to do is just select the store in the Standalone Application Settings for the app, and then the LiveCode IAP API will “behind the scenes” communicate with each store-specific IAP API, depending on which store the developer has selected to distribute the app through.

IAP APIs for Samsung, Amazon and Google

The new LiveCode IAP API will allow the user to query for specific product information (such as price, description etc) before they make a purchase, and will support purchasing of subscription items for all available stores.

I will keep you posted on the progress of the project, so stay tuned!