Why Google Play In-App Subscription in Vookmark?

What is Vookmark?

There are many bookmark managers like pocket but we don’t have something specific for videos.So we decided build one and that’s the reason for Vookmark’s existence.

Most of the bookmarking services store just the url and redirect you when you visit their dashboard. Vookmark allows you to watch all videos in one place without messy redirections.

Why we choose subscription business model?

The subscription business model is one of the best ways to make more regular, reliable, and recurring revenue for multi-platform apps. In fact, both developers and users love subscription apps.

This monetisation strategy is very similar to one known as Freemium (Free to Premium). “Try first, then buy” — this is the key principle we followed in Vookmark. The app is free to download and offers some basic features but locks out premium features, which need to be purchased to extend the app’s functionality.

Why we choose Google Play In-App Subscription for Android?

I guess you have a doubt that, why we implement multiple payment sources(Google-play, AppStore and Stripe) for a single app. We wants to provide the hazel free experience to our users, during this free to premium transition and also we have couple of reasons for this Google play in-app subscription implementation, they are listed below

1. Google Play provides several subscription specific reports in the Google Play Console. It contains acquisition report, retention report, cancellations report.
2. Google Play also enables you to offer 3-day free trials (rather than previously a minimum of 7 days). From this our users are perceiving the value of the premium service.
3. Google Play lets you offer multiple payment options across countries with a trusted, reliable, and easy 2-step checkout process.
4. Google play provides Real-time developer notifications feature, it informs you of any change in subscriber state in real time, such as cancellation or suspension, so you can act on the information immediately.
5. Google Play now makes restoring a subscription much easier with the new subscription restore feature. Using this feature user can restore the cancelled subscription until the expiration date.

Google play In-app subscription implementation:

Google provides an easy to use library that is able to handle the subscriptions and querying tasks. In this library, Google Play provides a straightforward, simple interface for sending In-app Billing requests and managing In-app Billing transactions.

While implementing In App Subscriptions we found that the process of implementing it was not that complicated, but there were some hidden facts that took us time to figure out. It deserves a separate tech blog post. We are planning to write one soon. Keep watching this space for updates.

How we achieve multi-platform payment process using Google play In-app subscription?

When the user made a successful purchase request, we will get a receipt for a particular transaction, we are just forwarding this receipt payload to our Vookmark server and validating it in the server.

For this validation, Google provides receipt validation through the Google Play Developer API, within the API, there are two endpoints: Purchases.products: get and Purchases.subscriptions: get.

In our case we are using Purchases.subscriptions: get is for verifying and re-verifying auto-renewing product subscriptions. To use this API we must know the packageName, productID and purchaseToken all of these can be found in the receipt payload we received during purchase.

We need an access token which we can get by creating a Google API service account. To get started with a service account go to the Google play Developer console API access settings page and Link your project with the service account, which will help us to validate the purchase detail using Google play Developer API.

Write once, run anywhere

Though we used multiple payment mediums for payment process, but we consolidate everything in our server. So the payment triggering point is different, order receipt payload is different, the validating mechanism is also different, but we clubbed everything together and make it as a unified payment platform and provide the seamless experience to our users across all platforms.

For detailed Backend Integration check this medium post by one of our team member.

How we manage payments across multiple platforms in Vookmark 🤑💸

Give a try and enjoy the seamless cross platform application for video bookmaking at Vookmark.

Happy Vookmarking ! 😎

Happy Earning! 🤑