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I was wondering if anyone has any experience selling apps through the Android, iPhone and Windows Phone market places using a subscription (recurring) payment model?

I have the requirement to develop a cross platform WP7, iPhone, Android application for a health and fitness company. The company wishes to sell the app as a monthly subscription, rather like you would a gym membership. It will be delivering personalised workout and nutrition advice to users as they progress through the programme.

I've read that iPhone supports directly a subscription model for content-delivery apps, e.g. newsreaders, that android supports in-app payments however Windows Phone doesn't seem to support anything like this. So, my question is:

  1. Is something like recurring payments natively supported by any or all of the three main marketplaces?
  2. If not, is there a workaround? Like prompting the user to renew monthly or quarterly and processing a new payment? Any comments / suggestions welcome.
  3. Finally, what caveats should I be aware of with the three main marketplace hosts? I've heard horror stories of companies blacklisted for processing payments outside of the marketplace agreements.

The Windows Phone application policy states

Your application must be fully functional when acquired from Windows Phone Marketplace (except for additional data as permitted below). Unless you have a pre-existing billing relationship with the user, your application may not require the user to provide payment information, within the application experience, to activate, unlock, or extend usage of the application.

However this paragraph seems to be ambigious. If anyone has any further information on this specifically I would appreciate it!

Finally, I have found some third party payment processors which claim to allow subscription payments through cloud services, e.g.

Again appreciate anyone who has had experience with using a similar method to achieve a subscription or recurring payment, even one driven by the user.

Best regards,

Community
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Dr. Andrew Burnett-Thompson
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1 Answers1

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As told by a Microsoft rep yesterday:
The only way to do this on Windows Phone will be to redirect the user to a website and take the payment there. It's not permitted to take payment details directly within an app.

paulgavrikov
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Matt Lacey
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  • But its legit to do so. If so, great! As it happens reviewing the market it seems a common model to monetize apps like this is have free and pro, with pro costing around £3 for one off downloads. Then using the volume of users of free to deliver parter ads or redirect traffic to a web store with merchandise. Seems value is skewed on the marketplace - a product which could reasonably cost £50 on the web is £3 on mobile! – Dr. Andrew Burnett-Thompson Feb 02 '12 at 07:02
  • @Dr.AndrewBurnett-Thompson pricing of any product is a complicated process filled with nuances. It's furtherr complicated on mobile as there is a large expectancy that devices will be free and many developers want to compete on price and yet still hope to make a fortune. – Matt Lacey Feb 02 '12 at 11:14