

Notes from adding in-app billing to my Android app - psychotik
http://crazyviraj.blogspot.com/2011/06/some-notes-on-implementing-in-app.html

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zmmmmm
Google's lack of responsiveness to bug reports in general is really
perplexing. I can understand it might take them time to address things, that
they are busy and have other priorities, etc. But the manner in which they
deal with bug reports is so terse and dismissive I find it insulting. Bugs
with a huge number of people following and explaining in detail the problem
will get ignored, closed with zero comments, closed with 4 words of
meaningless comment, etc. Just to give an example -

<http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=8488>

It seems to me that they created the bug reporting system and then put nobody
in charge of monitoring it or maintaining it and most likely no one has
authority to even respond to half these bugs, except top people like Romain
Guy who consider it beneath them. This is really burning a lot of good will in
some of Google and Android's most enthusiastic supporters.

~~~
jen_h
It's really odd. I'm following critical Android bugs from 2008 that haven't
been touched by a developer. And minor bugs that a developer's commented
on/scolded the "me too!"s on. And a bunch of bugs that are duped all over the
place.

They really could use a good, thorough, old fashioned bug scrub with QA and
maintenance teams heavily involved/leading the charge. Cleaning up the bug
database is a daunting no-fun task, for sure, but it looks terrible to
outsiders and bug triage is a perfect place for new employees (junior
developers, QA, and support staff) to get their feet wet while they still lack
the emotional attachment...it's the perfect bootcamp.

The stats on this would be fascinating, too - for instance, I'd love to know
the percentage of dupes. :)

Conversely, making senior developers responsible for triaging bugs straight
from the public (and doing first line support for some of these, which does
appear to happen from time to time) can lead to some serious burnout.

~~~
zmmmmm
The worst problem here is one of PR. Google should at least pay some nice
friendly intern to sit down and go through each bug and write a "Thanks for
reporting this, we appreciate your time and I'll try and get the right person
to look at it" type comment, with periodic, "Sorry there's been no progress on
this, we're really busy as you can understand" - totally meaningless, but
costs almost nothing and completely changes the feel of the discussion.
Obviously they should do much better, but a token PR effort would be a nice
minimum.

------
programminggeek
So, one question I have is how much does in-app billing improve the bottom
line of your app? Does in-app purchase really make a free app more profitable
than a straight up paid app or how does it compare?

I haven't seen much data myself on these kind of comparisons, so I'm quite
curious.

~~~
jen_h
I can't provide a comparison between paid vs. in-app, as our app is free, but
here's our experience so far:

We've had in-app billing in place since mid-April. The income is helpful as
any income is, but so far income from in-app purchases does not outstrip
customer support and server costs (we do our own support, so factor in that
for a small startup, you could be actually developing new features and
improving the product vs. answering questions, handling refunds, having to
dance like a marionette to get someone at Google to look at a critical billing
bug).

Luckily, we do have an iOS app as well to subsidize the Android side of the
house...but money doesn't buy time in this market, unfortunately.

Our cancellation rate is 20%. That is, for every 100 purchases, there are 20
cancellations for various reasons.

We suspected this outcome going into it, so this was not really a big deal to
us - any offset to the support and maintenance costs is a boon, in our
opinion, and keeping our users happy is important - Android users were bummed
about missing the extra features, so we made it so.

We had a few hitches right out of the box with purchases getting lost
(<https://code.google.com/p/marketbilling/issues/detail?id=14>), but we're
able to help users around that if we're lucky enough that they contact us
about it.

For the past week, however (right before the June 15th maintenance), Android
Market isn't sending purchase status back to a subset of users, resulting in
users paying multiple times for products that never get delivered
(<https://code.google.com/p/marketbilling/issues/detail?id=32>).

So our revenues are going up! Except they're not, and I'm spending two hours a
day dealing with angry customers who think we're thieves and ferreting through
the Merchant Center trying to pre-emptively catch these broken transactions
before a customer sees they were charged $20 bucks for a $1.99 feature because
they didn't think the purchase took. Some of them I won't be able to catch
unless they contact us, as it's not uncommon for people to use multiple credit
cards with different names on them.

The fact that it's nearly impossible to get Google's attention on this is
incredibly distressing. I've commented on bugs, reported it multiple times to
the Merchant Center (our case has been forwarded "to a specialist"), reported
it via the Market Publisher site form, posted a forum message...why is it so
hard to get Google's attention on something like this? Don't their fancy
algorithms pick up on the fact that in-app revenue has jumped up across the
board? It's one thing that users aren't able to purchase (that sucks), but an
entirely different thing if users are able to purchase 20 times, but never get
what they paid for.

To be honest, in-apps really aren't seeming very worth the risk. I am hoping
they work to change this, but it seems pretty bleak right now.

~~~
psychotik
That's great feedback - your sentiment regarding Google's apathy seems to be
evident in all the bug reports, as was a big red flag to me like I mentioned
in my post.

Are you losing users, or do users understand after they contact you? Just
curious if you're bleeding customers because of Google's problems. At some
point, if Google doesn't fix this, I assume this is going to make you rollback
your in-app purchases.

~~~
jen_h
Not currently, our users are pretty awesome, on the whole, we're really lucky
in that respect. I actually haven't gotten much feedback from those who've
contacted us (I've been following up to get more detail about their OS, Market
version, etc - in case there's a common thread that I could post along with
the issue reports), but I think once they get their refund, they go on their
way...

The real problem are the users that never contact us about it and just leave
negative reviews...it's super common for users to leave angry reviews, but
never contact you to give you a chance to fix it and there's no way to tie a
review to a customer, I guess I could contact every "Ashley" that attempted a
purchase in the last week...

What's also really odd is that I'm not hearing back from anyone that I pre-
emptively refunded. We do have to pay transaction fees for refunds, not sure
how/if/whether Google will do anything about this. Likely the large number of
refunds will bot-flag us as a "bad app." Oy.

~~~
psychotik
I wrote @timbray to get attention on those bugs - maybe you can too?

~~~
jen_h
Will try it, but he hasn't responded to other queries from folks on Twitter
about very important things re:Android developers, but I guess it's worth a
try. Just had to refund a bunch more today. Thanks for the tip!

~~~
psychotik
I think I have a hack that'll save you commission on refund. Follow/DM me on
Twitter and I can share.

