In-app purchase app for iPhone

In-app purchase on iPhone is an excellent concept developed by Apple to provide flexibility to support different business models in the iPhone application market.

What is in-app purchase?

In a simple term, it refers to the sale of magazines / digital content, etc. from an iPhone application. Using it, we can sell our digital content for iPhone application users.

By using the in-app purchase, it is possible to offer customers additional digital content features, services, and also free and paid in-app subscriptions.

It works for both the iPhone and iPad applications.

Here are some examples of in-app purchase of an iPhone app.

(1) Digital e-books, for example PDF files

(2) Photos

(3) Additional game levels in the game application.

(4) Magazines

Deploying it to any app store kit frame is helpful, which is readily available in the frame list in XCode.

Store Kit provides functionality for the payment process of the items offered in the application through the application store.

Important note for the payment process is that from the payment of the application, if the developer paid for the application, he will receive only 70% of the purchase price and the rest of the 30% will go to Apple.

There are some important guidelines given below for app design.

1. The services or goods that you are going to deliver from the application must be digital. Do not use real world goods and services to sell by in-app purchase.
2. All articles or products must be registered as a user.
3. Provide the appropriate exchange rate to users for the purchase of goods or services.
4. The products or items you offer for purchase cannot contain or be related to pornography, hate speech, defamation or gambling (simulated gambling is accepted).

There are four types of in-app purchase items / products that you can sell from the app:

1. happy
2. Functionality
3. Services
4. Subscriptions

There are different types that are supported.

1. Consumable
2. Not consumable
3. Automatic renewable subscriptions
4. Subscriptions
5. Consumable

Consumable products should be purchased each time according to the needs of the user of that product.

Users must pay each time at the time of product purchase.

Not consumable

A particular user purchases non-consumable products once.

Once a non-consumable product is purchased, it is free from the next purchase and the in-store kit provides built-in support to restore non-consumable products on different devices registered to the user’s iTunes account so that other devices can download the same product bought for free.

Automatic renewable subscriptions

Auto-renewable subscription products are delivered to all devices of the user who purchased the product as well as non-consumable products.

The duration of the subscription is given in this type of products when it is created in iTunes.

Subscription renewal every time is done automatically when subscription expires in the Apple store if the option to auto-renew subscription is provided on the product creation page in iTunes and if that option is disabled, the app store never will renew the subscription automatically even if the subscription has expired.

Subscriptions

The subscription is a mechanism for the creation of products with a limited period of time and during that time limits for the purchase of products delivered to the user.

During that period, the user can purchase products multiple times on multiple devices as desired.

The subscription is not automatically renewed.

To manage subscriptions, auto-renewable and consumable subscription type product details are needed to store on the developer’s server to manage their functionality.

For non-consumable products, Apple manages the functionality by restoring the purchased product managed by the store kit.

To use in in-app purchase, the in-app purchase option must be enabled on the ID of the app that the app purchase will be deployed to on the developer portal.

The code is also required to implement in the application also for all product purchases and for payment transactions.

In-app, all in-app purchase products can be viewable with their details using the product ID specified on the product creation page in iTunes.

To use in app purchases, apps and app purchase products must be in review mode or successfully launched in the Apple store.

iTunes offers the ability to test the in-app purchase in development mode by creating a test user from the new user tab in the iTunes developer portal.