About IAP Technology

Generalities about IAP technologies that all developers have to know.

Present on both iOS and Android, In-App Purchases (IAP) allow you to integrate a variety of virtual products that users can purchase right from your application.

Virtual Products

You can offer 4 types of virtual products:

• Auto-Renewing Subscriptions.

  • Subscriptions that will be renewed automatically every period, until canceled by the user.

• Non-Renewing Subscriptions.

  • Temporary subscriptions that users have to renew manually.

• Consumable products

  • For virtual currencies or similar (gems, gold, lives, ...).

  • Stuff that can be purchased (and consumed) multiple times.

• Non-Consumable products

  • For unlocking a premium feature.

  • Stuff that can be purchased only once.

Android actually only makes the difference between products incurring recurring or non-recurring payments, i.e. Auto-Renewing Subscriptions vs everything else. But iOS has a strict differentiation between those 4 categories. As such the plugin provides the logic for those 4 categories on both platforms. You can write your code once and have it work everywhere.

User Accounts

Purchases are linked to a user's iTunes / Google account. As such, it's made available on all devices for this user.

Test Accounts

On both iOS and Android, you can create Test Users that do not pay for the purchases they make. We'll show you how to achieve this.