Can you have in-app purchase in a free app? - windows-8

I am making a game for windows 8 and I am going to have ads in it. I want to offer to remove ads as an in-app purchase but according to the microsoft guides the app has to have been sold to be able to handle in-app purchases. Are there any ways to allow in-app purchases without selling the app? I want it to be free, not sold or trialed.

Yes you can do this. I dont know where you've seen you cant. I do this in two of my apps (Peregrine and "Map Wallpaper")

Related

Number of in-app purchases for Windows Store app

I have a Windows Store app for a newspaper in the Windows Store. Each issue (one per work day) can be bought using in-app purchases. In Windows Store, it looks like i can define only 100 in app purchases. In my case, that is about 4 months of daily issues.
Is 100 really the limit? Has anyone found a way to add more?
I cannot find a way to add more in-app purchases to the app. The milit of 100 would be a really stupid constraint and I would need to remove to ability to buy old issues in order to add new issues.
Windows 8 doesn't support subscription-based purchases but it does support time-limited purchases.
One option is to let the user purchase "credits" that can be applied toward an issue. Similar to how Audible lets you purchase audiobooks with credits.
Here's the thing though. Newspapers make money off advertisements. The purchase price isn't for the content, it's for the materials that it costs to deliver the paper. A digital paper costs nothing to deliver so why are you charging for it?
The store does not support subscriptions. However you can just use a third party provider for this.
As mentioned in the 'Flexible business Model'
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/hh852650.aspx
The Windows Store provides you with the freedom to choose the business
model that’s right for your apps. The Store provides full platform
support for free apps, trials (both time-based and feature-based), and
paid apps, as well as in-app purchases. You’re free to manage customer
transactions directly using your own or third-party services for
in-app purchases and subscriptions, or use the services provided by
the Windows Store. For apps that are supported by ads, you’re free to
choose the ad platform that best meets your goals.
Paypal is accessible via this api:
http://paypal.github.com/Windows8SDK/
or directly via a form post
How to Form POST to Paypal from WinJS iframe Windows 8 App?

Paypal payments for monthly subscription inside iPad native app

I am working on an enterprise app which allows users to perform CRUD operations on data
under their profiles, sync it with a backend, share it with other users and view it across multiple platforms.
The app works on 3 platforms
a) as a webapp in browser
b) as a native iOS app on iPad
c) as a native android app on android tablets
Now we want to give the app for free for a trial period of 3 months after which we want to
charge our users a monthly subscription fee if they want to continue syncing their data
with backend. If not, they can use the app as a native app which doesn't have a backend
and they won't be able to share their data across platforms and with other users but will
be able to use the app as a native app with no backend.
For the monthly subscription fee, we wanted to integrate Paypal payments into our ipad
app.
There are 2 gray areas which is causing us confusion
a) Apple might reject the app due to paypal integration as it favours in-app purchases/itunes.
b) Apple states that users can be charged only for "real world service". Does our kind of service qualify?
We prefer getting some definitive information rather than implementing paypal payments and
getting rejected by apple which will set us back by 14 days. Any help would be much appreciated.
I don't think you'll get "definite" information here, since stackoverflow does not have internal information on Apple's strategies. You have to try and find out. I know Apps with monthly subscriptions that use in-app purchases (like Trillian).
If you want to make sure it won't get rejected, exclude the payment process from the app. You are using accounts and some accounts get paid "premium" functionality. Just let the users pay through your website or redirect them to your website if they want to buy from iPad. My guess would be that Apple will otherwise want you to use in-app purchases for the subscription.
About the "real world service", that should be no problem.

Example Apps that uses Windows 8 in-app purchase system in the Windows Store

Are there any apps in Windows Store that uses in-app purchase system?
If yes, which ones are that?
Wordastic and Word Recon are two games I've seen with live In-App purchases.
At present, Wacky Wordsearch seems to have made it to the store with simulated IAPs, if you want to see that process.

Metro app (windows 8, winrt). Can I add new in-app purchase products after my application will available on Windows Store without updating application

I develop metro (windows 8, winrt) application for selling ebooks. I want to use Windows store as the payment processor to support Windows Store in-app purchases.
I am interested in next questions:
Can I add new in-app purchase products after my application will available on Windows Store without updating application?
(Or I will always need to update app when create a new in-app purchase product ?)
Can I add new in-app purchase product programmatically (dynamically) to Windows Store in-app purchase products list?
If I will add 100 new books every day - I will need every day add 100 new in-app purchase products?
Is there limitation to count of in-app purchase products?
You can always add new in-app purchases after your app is approved in the Windows Store; however, for your scenario it sounds like you might be better off rolling your own third-party payment system and using that instead.
That way you aren't bottlenecked by the Windows Store and don't lose a 30% cut (eventually 20% if your app exceeds $20k in lifetime sales, which includes in app purchases.) The trade off is that you have to convince users to provide you with some other form of payment information (PayPal, recurring billing on a credit card, etc...)
If you can tolerate the turn-around time of the Windows Store, that option would probably be easiest for you.
You should always update you app, but:
If you update only products - your app will be reviewed faster than
usualy.
Also, you can list some extra products. To have a some kind of
buffer.
I suggest you to ask your question here

Selling Books in an iOS App

I am working on an iOS project where the customer wants to sell hardcopy books in the application. I did this application using PayPal, but I don't think Apple will approve the PayPal user and the book will delivered to buyers by address. How can handle this? I want also to sell ebooks and I don't know how to handle that.
Thanks!
You should read the developer guidelines very carefully, but there doesn't seem to be any restriction against creating apps that sell physical goods. You can't use In-app Purchasing for that, but it doesn't sound like you want to anyway:
https://developer.apple.com/appstore/guidelines.html