Setting up a renewable app help please!

[MichelleCSI]

Can anyone please help me out with this issue?

Alright, so the company I'm representing is creating an app for the android market and i'm doing research for my boss on subscriptions/renewable options for it.

Specifically he's thinking about our app having options for 1/3/5-year license giving rights to multiple variations of the database, but having to be renewed (and paid for) every three years.
For example, I see Apps in the Android marketplace that cost as much as $5.99 per month

 

[barqers]

It's possible to have someone pay through the android market monthly costs?

I thought you'd have people download your app for let's say 7-day free trial or something (or none at all for that matter). Then in the settings they could purchase through the app. After the 7 day free trial they would be forced to pay or else it would simply close.

You'd set up the payments through the app via credit card or whatever you'd like, then you'd send a notification back to the app (probably best to encrypt all of this). The app would then use the notification and create an entry in the database which tells it which day it's useful until. Mind you, you'd need to take some good security measures to keep people from pirating your app. Encryption would be one, writing your own algorithms to mutilate the passkey. Maybe you could even make the encryption specific to the phone? By reading phone data (the model of the phone) you could use that information to encrypt the data. If they wanted to use the app on a different phone/tablet they could simply contact you and have you resend the license to their second app.

Anyways just my two cents on how I'd do it.

 

[John Redcorn]

I'm pretty sure all of us here will be using android 1 year from now, but 3 years? 5 years? no one knows what new smartphone/tablet os will be around nor do they have any guarantee you'll develop for it. (or that whatever you're doing might not be available free from elsewhere in that time.) Would not do.

Unless of course your customers are gov/medical/some corporations who seem to love being locked into a particular old OS or hardware. If that's the case add some 10 and 20 year options there and you have a winner.

You say a database, something remote? How about charge through a separate means for access to the database not the app.

 

[MichelleCSI]

thanks guys, i'll send this to him, and hopefully he might be able to understand what you two are saying because I know i certainly don't understand this technical lingo haha

if you have any more ideas, suggestions, advice, please do let me know. let the responses continue to flow!

thanks again!