In-App-Purchases

We’re used to going through the approval process for binaries, but in-app purchases are a bit different. Here’s some of what I learned going through this for Flower Garden. Purchase States When you first create an in-app purchase in iTunes Connect, it is listed as “Pending Developer Approval”. This means that if you ask for info on that product id with a SKProductsRequest, you’ll get the info for the item only on development builds, not in distributions builds. ...

One of the big advantages of in-app purchases for some people is that it makes pirating content more difficult. For me it wasn’t much of an issue because a) Most of the people who enjoy Flower Garden aren’t the ones checking out the app warez sites, and b) I know better than to waste my time trying to prevent piracy [1]. Besides, I always roll my eyes whenever I hear that 90% or some other large percentage of the users are using a pirated copy, so the developer lost all that money. News flash: 99% of those users using a cracked version wouldn’t have bought your product anyway, so you can rest a bit easier at night. ...

The last entry about in-app purchases left off with the products correctly displayed on the store and ready for purchase. Let’s push that buy button! Purchasing a product The store is fully populated, the items are displayed and, if all goes well, the user presses the buy button. What now? At this point I check that in-app purchases are enabled and if they aren’t, I put up a message box. Apple says you can also do this earlier, but I figured I’d rather show users what’s available and entice them to buy it. By the time they get that message, they’ll be much more likely to enable them and continue the purchase than if they never saw the store in the first place. ...

Ever since Apple announced OS 3.0 with in-app purchases, I knew I had implement it in Flower Garden. The concept of in-app purchases fits very well with the idea of a flower shop where virtual gardeners can purchase extra items for their gardens. It was just a matter of justifying the time necessary to implement it. I knew from my previous experience with downloadable content in games that only a small amount of the people who originally purchased the game would be interested in buying additional content. Flower Garden has been extremely well received, both by the media and the players, but it never got high-up enough on the charts to be a big seller, so in-app purchases were doomed from the start to be very limited. ...