In-App Purchase

This morning Apple announced the general availability of their subscription APIs — most notably present in “The Daily” iPad app. This gives developers a powerful new option for generating recurring revenue for their apps.

Over the past few months we have been working with publishers such as The Daily Mail, Guardian and Newsweek in providing the means to handle subscriptions. Our solution manages the key requirements around Apple’s subscriptions policy, such as content delivery, user management and content recovery.  Until today, automatic subscription renewals via iTunes were unavailable.   With today’s announcement, we’ll be integrating this new functionality into our Subscriptions product very soon.

In addition, Apple now gives the publisher the ability to gather information about their subscribers. Things like full name, email address and zip code help publishers understand more about the demographics of their subscriber base. We’ll be updating our subscription solution to support the ability to gather, track and manage this kind of data from Apple as well, making it a seamless turn-key solution for publishers.

Apple  continues to leave a significant amount of work to the developers even after this announcement, and we’ll continue to offer services for managing and delivering content (i.e., digital editions), unlocking features, as well as authenticating users and accounts outside of Apple’s ecosystem.

As always, we will be working on offering these same features across other platforms like Android and BlackBerry.  Stay tuned!

Google announced yesterday it will be introducing In-App Purchase into its Android mobile platform. We here at Urban Airship are elated about this. We will offer full support for Android in-app billing on our platform along with our existing iOS, BlackBerry and Android offerings. With this new service, Android developers will be able to sell content directly within their applications and as we’ve seen from the recent numbers, this presents a huge opportunity for increasing app revenue.

Our team has a lot of experience working with In-App Purchase on other platforms and we are excited to see what is in store for Android. After playing with the sample code, we can say for sure that In-App Purchase for Android promises to be a rich offering that will do much to increase monetization opportunities for developers on the Android platform. We will be announcing beta access later this month.

Similar to what Urban Airship In-App Purchase for iOS provides, Android in-app billing will provide simple purchasing of additional content offerings. End users will follow a workflow similar to traditional purchases via Google Checkout. They can one-click to their default payment system or enter a credit card number. Our tool will manage the content delivery and receipt verification via our API as well as provide additional benefits beyond what you get out of the box with Android in-app billing. We’ll also add support for Urban Airship Subscriptions. Urban Airship In-App Purchase for Android will integrate with Android Market 2.3, making both our In-App Purchase and Push solution backwards compatible to Android OS version 1.6.

Additional features of Urban Airship In-App Purchase for Android:

• Dynamic content: The Android Market limits application size to 25mb (even over wifi). This can be a deal breaker for apps with rich content and media files. Thanks to our In-App Purchase offering, your app now has room to grow. Upload paid and free content to us and we’ll deliver it to the end user while you focus on building your application.
• Security made easy: Urban Airship reduces complexity around security by doing all the heavy lifting for you. Our tool validates all purchase receipts before delivering content to the application, keeping your content out of the bad guys hands.
• Versioning and updates: Urban Airship tracks updates to purchasable content for you and notifies users when updates are available. Find a bug in the new level you shipped? Not a problem, you can update it without shipping an additional app update.

All in all, this is very exciting news. Developers are quickly realizing that In-App Purchase is the most efficient way to monetize their apps and we’re happy to see this available to the millions of Android users.

If you would like to be notified of Urban Airship In-App Purchase for Android availability, or get early beta access, fill out the form below and we’ll let you know when it becomes available.

Updated 2/18/11 – Clarified Android versioning of OS versus Market App.

*Beta Signups Closed*

Newsweek makes it interesting this week with the release of its latest iPad app. The publisher has been on the cutting edge with its apps and is now the first major publisher to offer in-app subscriptions to its iPad users. This is a major differentiator… and where Urban Airship comes in.

As the New York Times article points out, the inability to offer subscriptions has been “a source of major frustration” for magazine and newspaper publishers. It is no easy feat to add in-app subscriptions that work within the Apple guidelines and practices. One of our engineering team members described the task as “Herculean,” which is apt, given the amount of code required to make it work.

As Richard Stephenson explains in his post, implementing subscriptions is difficult because Apple’s SDK for in-app purchase extends only to single-copy sales.

As publishers have raced to market with apps for the iPad, they have faced many unforeseen challenges in their attempt to transform a business model to fit the new paradigm. And the lessons they have learned will have broad impact across the industry. Conversations around subscriptions have mainly centered in the context of how magazines offer them – upfront money paid by a reader for access to content for a set period of time. But this subscriptions-monetization model translates to much much more than magazines and news. Any organization that provides information or content can succeed in monetizing their mobile strategies with Urban Airship.

Think of any content that users would pay for up-front: a 6-month magazine subscription, a one-year association membership, or an ongoing opt-in research database. In each use case with a mobile app, Urban Airship helps manage all aspects of the transaction, including identifying which devices (users) have paid for content, verifying the user account, and delivering the content to the device. Urban Airship tracks the entire lifecycle of a subscription. We see this as an important new monetization blueprint for all types of developers, and we are making it easy for them to integrate.

Further simplifying the process, if a user buys a new device, they still have rights to access back issues or other content they have paid for. Our subscriptions service manages this verification, associating a specific user with an account. Our service also enables “user entitlements.” In this process, content can be “unlocked” for designated users or those who have been authenticated. Publishers can put content behind a paywall, viewable only to subscribers. This is similar to what many information-providers have been doing on the web. An ID and password are used to unlock that content and make it viewable.

Publishers and content providers are wading in new waters and still in the early stages of identifying their mobile strategies. This is a dynamic market but one thing we know for certain: things are just starting to get interesting.

There’s lots of chatter today about the issues Time Inc is having with Apple and the subscriptions portion of its iPad apps. As Peter Kafka writes today on All Things Digital, Apple rejected the subscription version of the Time Magazine app, surprising Time executives and forcing the publisher to only sell single copies of the magazines, meaning users need to download and pay for each issue as individual transactions. All purchases use iTunes as a middleman.

Considering this is an entirely new medium for content, it’s no surprise that the industry is working out some kinks. Given the debate we wanted to share some of our insight, developed through engagement with our customers in the publishing industry, who are integrating our solution as we speak for their upcoming iPad magazine apps, which plan to offer subscriptions.

In a nutshell, when it comes to taking publications to iPads and other mobile devices, publishers face several challenges:

• No way to offer subscriptions (only single-issue downloads)
• No clear way to track conversion rates when subscriptions end
• No way to offer magazine subscriptions as gifts
• No easy way to alert app users to new content

Publishers want subscriptions so they can have valuable customer data – this is how they demonstrate value to advertisers and has been thus for eons. Users want subscriptions because it costs a lot less per issue. I know I much prefer the $1 / issue of Vanity Fair each month than the $5 or whatever at the newsstand.

How Urban Airship is addressing these challenges through StoreFront

Our subscription feature, a component of its in-app purchase offering, is designed to manage all aspects of the subscription flow to mobile devices, including delivering new content, alerting subscribers to new content and tracking the billing aspects associated with ongoing downloads. So the team here built a great way to manage the flow of content. With StoreFront, they’ve also created a way to let customers avoid two main issues Apple implies are the reason for the rejection.

1) Concern about customer data. We don’t keep track of any data on the customers. Meaning we don’t actually store customer email addresses or UDIDs, just hashed versions. Publishers might obtain information about their target audience through their own devices, but StoreFront doesn’t help at all with that. We simply manage who has access to what content based on the hashed data and then deliver the content.

2) Revenue share. StoreFront subscriptions still funnel through iTunes; users get new content from within the app. The billing set up is the same as with any app delivering content via in-app purchase.

So that’s how we are helping publishers while staying in compliance with all of Apple’s published guidelines. We can’t promise perfection, but we know we’re close. We hope to see the publication apps from our customers available soon. (personally, I can’t wait; these are apps of beauty). When the apps are available, we’ll be sure to mention it. In the meantime, we are watching how this plays out very closely.

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People certainly like their iPads – Apple just announced that it has already sold 1 million iPads. Our in-app purchase app developers like these devices too, and they’ve have been clamoring for us to support Urban Airship StoreFront on the iPad. Well now we do.

As of today, Urban Airship In-App Purchase now has a native iPad interface. This is more than just a tweak of our existing interface; it’s is a ground-up redesign that gives developers significantly more control and flexibility. But that’s not all. We were so pleased with how the iPad in-app purchase turned out that we went back to the original version of In-App Purchase for the iPhone and applied the same updates. So no matter which always-connected device you use, you’ll have access to the same new features, including:

• Visible content accounting: See what items you have purchased and/or which items need to be updated.
• Content filtering: Manage a large list of content with our even-easier-to-use search. Users enter in a few letters, we filter the list of available content and we do it on-the-fly.
• Flexible content ordering: Order your content by product ID, price, name, etc.

Visit the full changelog to see the complete list of changes.

Six Degrees of Hollywood - Now for the iPhone

Thumb Arcade takes a slightly skewed view of life and applies it to everything it does. In partnership with the creators and authors of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Thumb Arcade created a pop-culture trivia classic with an exciting new twist. 6DOH, also known as the Six Degrees of Hollywood game, is a wildly addictive actor/movie trivia game that requires players to link actors through their shared film roles in a predetermined number of steps (or degrees).

6DOH is fast-paced and relies heavily on engaging and up-to-the-minute content. The app is free on iTunes, offering full game play and many games. Thumb Arcade then offers multiple in-app purchase options, so users can expand their movie knowledge across more genres, decades, actors and the like. 6DOH relies on Urban Airship In-App Purchase to make sure those purchases happen quickly and accurately.

“With a game like 6DOH that requires intensive graphics work, mountains of content creation and advanced multiplayer challenge components, it was crucial that the main piece that would earn us revenue would work. It just had to,” says Player 01, co-owner at Thumb Arcade. “Dropping the Urban Airship code into place was quick and hassle free. We give them two thumbs up!”

Great news. We have updated Urban Airship In-App Purchase , our popular app monetization service for the iPhone platform.

In StoreFront 1.5 In-App Purchase 1.5, we managed to squeeze in a hefty number of enhancements, including the following:

• Internationalization- It’s much easier than ever to support your app in multiple languages. You need only to provide the translations — no need to change the UA code base.
• Landscape-mode- StoreFront now supports both landscape and portrait mode.
  
• “Restore all” button – Available on the updates screen, this feature will restore all non-consumable content. This will come in handy when users reset their devices.
• A new default UI – A few users who implemented the UA client library reported rejections from Apple for StoreFront. StoreFront 1.5 has a new look-and-feel that has been integrated by those customers who reported rejections are now approved. We think you’ll like the new UI even better than the old.

For developers refreshing In-App Purchase on their app: please check to see if the user has disabled purchases via parental controls. If they have, you’ll need to notify them that they need to re-enable these immediately upon opening StoreFront.

A full changelog (including previous versions), is here.

And the new code is available for download here.

You can browse the source at BitBucket, of course.

Please give it a whirl and send us any feedback. We’re already moving on to the next upgrade, so stay in touch.