In-app Billing is a Google Play service that lets you sell digital content from inside your applications. You can use the service to sell a wide range of content, including downloadable content such as media files or photos, virtual content such as game levels or potions, premium services and features, and more. You can use In-app Billing to sell products as
- Standard in-app products (one-time billing), or
- Subscriptions, (recurring, automated billing)
Support for subscriptions New!
In-app Billing now lets you sell subscriptions in your apps, as well as standard in-app products. For details on how to sell subscriptions to content, services, and features, see the Subscriptions documentation.
When you use the in-app billing service to sell an item, whether it's an in-app product or a subscription, Google Play handles all checkout details so your application never has to directly process any financial transactions. Google Play uses the same checkout backend service as is used for application purchases, so your users experience a consistent and familiar purchase flow (see figure 1). Also, the transaction fee for in-app purchases is the same as the transaction fee for application purchases (30%).
Any application that you publish through Google Play can implement In-app Billing. No special account or registration is required other than an Android Market publisher account and a Google Wallet Merchant account. Also, because the service uses no dedicated framework APIs, you can add in-app billing to any application that uses a minimum API level of 4 or higher.
To help you integrate in-app billing into your application, the Android SDK provides a sample application that demonstrates how to sell standard in-app products and subscriptions from inside an app. The sample contains examples of billing-related classes you can use to implement in-app billing in your application. It also contains examples of the database, user interface, and business logic you might use to implement in-app billing.
Important: Although the sample application is a working example of how you can implement in-app billing, we strongly recommend that you modify and obfuscate the sample code before you use it in a production application. For more information, see Security and Design.
Figure 1. Applications initiate in-app billing requests through their own UI (first screen). Google Play responds to the request by providing the checkout user interface (middle screen). When checkout is complete, the application resumes.
To learn more about Google Play's in-app billing service and start integrating it into your applications, read the following documents:
- Overview of In-app Billing
- Learn how the service works and what a typical in-app billing implementation looks like.
- Implementing In-app Billing
- Use this step-by-step guide to start incorporating in-app billing into your application. The instructions apply to both one-time and subscription purchases.
- Subscriptions
- Learn how subscriptions work and how to implement support for them in your app.
- Security and Design
- Review these best practices to help ensure that your in-app billing implementation is secure and well designed.
- Testing In-app Billing
- Understand how the in-app billing test tools work and learn how to test your in-app billing implementation.
- Administering In-app Billing
- Learn how to set up your product list, register test accounts, and handle refunds.
- In-app Billing Reference
- Get detailed information about Google Play response codes and the in-app billing interface.