It is the first question for many freemium (game) developers out there contemplating support for the Amazon's still quite new Appstore. The announcement of Kindle Fire, which could sell around 5m units before the end of the year (and possibly 15m until the end of 2013), makes this question even more relevant.
I've tried to ask Amazon itself. This is their response:
We have not announced a proprietary in-app purchase or subscriptions solution for the Amazon Appstore for Android. For app submissions integrated with other in-app payment or subscription technology, we test to ensure that the solution works and that the app complies with our linking policy in order to provide a great customer experience. For your reference, here is our linking policy.
I also added a question about alternative payment solutions like Paypal (which had been used on the Android Market before in-app billing was launched). This is what Amazon says:
When pointing to other apps from within your app, including up-sells, completion of purchase must be from the Amazon Appstore.
No clear answers unfortunately. Although it's obvious that:
- In-app purchases are not officialy supported on Appstore. Yet.
- There is a possibility of running in-app purchase through third-parties
- The in-app purchase through third-parties (e.g. PayPal) has to comply with the policy. As long as you're making the in-app purchase within their store, you should be fine.
Our Lonely Sock studio doesn't have hands-on experience implementing any of these yet so I can't confirm. It seems like the PayPal solution could work through Express Checkout embedded in mobile app.
Anyone doing in-app purchases on Amazon Appstore out there? Let us know!
