IntroductionLast week, Apple announced that in-app purchases will be available for free apps as well. This could probably free developers from creating “lite” and “pro” versions of the app and allow developers to “unlock” features inside the app and create business models that the AppStore haven’t seen. This model could be a great boon for developers like us to upsell our apps (provided they are of good quality) and to reduce piracy. In this article, we will look at how to incorporate StoreKit to do In-App purchases for your iPhone Application. Apple allows three types of purchases within the app and Apple terms them as consumables, non-consumables and subscriptions. Consumables are products that are “consumed” immediately. This means, if the purchase is made today, and the user wants to purchase it again tomorrow, he will be charged again when he attempts a purchase. Non-Consumables are features that are purchased exactly once. Apple automatically takes care of “remembering” those purchases and allows the user to purchase them again for free, just like downloading apps you already purchased. Subscriptions are the most complicated part, They behave like non-consumables during the subscribed period and like consumables after that. You as a developer have to ensure that anything that is subscribed by the user is available across all of his iTunes synced devices when they are purchased from one device. Hence, do not lock in-app purchases to UDIDs. This might even get your app rejected. The StoreKit, as on date, doesn’t have any built-in mechanism to do it automatically which is why subscriptions are a bit tougher to develop. One important point to note is that, in-app purchases cannot be used to deliver product updates. Changes to the binary has to be separately submitted. However, if you are a game developer, game data, maps, levels and other “data files” are allowed for in-app purchase. In this post, we will focus on how to prepare your app for enabling features for the “pro” version from the “lite”. Or technically, we will focus on how to bring in, consumables and non-consumables into your app. We will leave the subscriptions part to another blog post as it’s quite complicated and involves some server side programming as well. |