Integration and verification of iOS In-App Purchases

 Economy models in iOS apps use In-App purchases become very popular. Lots of developers pick iOS environment because of the flawless payments through iTunes.

If you’re planning to have a monetization model in your app, it has to go through Apple system and you have to use in-app purchases. There is no other way to accept payments from your iOS apps. There are pros and cons of using Apple in-app purchases. I’ll try to explain some of them.

The biggest con is Apple takes 30% of your sale. And another con is, there are difficulties and grayed areas in the integration of in-app purchases to your app and back-end. But the pros make all even. Because delegating whole payments to Apple is gonna affect your sales because Apple makes it so seamless that it reduces all money related steps to only one confirmation box. So it changes the purchase experience and makes it what it supposed to be. Most of the checkout or payment experiences on web, faces lots of drops because of unnecessary and boring steps like putting your credit card info, trying to give the trust to user that you’re a legitimate company and have legitimate payment system that you will not sell their info out or you won’t let hackers to pick your customer info up. All those buying experience changed in iTunes payments. So this is why you should want to integrate in-app purchases. Continue reading “Integration and verification of iOS In-App Purchases”

iPhone 5 and iPad Mini’s tend to fall easier and more often

I dropped my iPad mini this morning, it somehow flipped in my hands, fell and kissed the floor from the back side. I did similar with my MacBook pro 5-6 years ago, just a week after I bought it. That’s the only device I dropped until now.

I am usually very careful with my mobile devices but except this last incident, I never dropped my stuff. I’ve been using my iPhone 5 and I dropped it 3 times in the first week. I got my iPad mini last month and it also is lighter and thinner than they were.

I commute using the subway on a daily basis and I usually read on my iPad, I wasn’t carrying my regular iPad but I started to have the new one almost every day. I use a crowded subway line in the mornings and this morning, I was hustling with the crowd to get in and after I got in, I was stabilizing my position and somehow iPad flipped in my hands and I dropped it. It was between stress moment and playing cool 🙂 Nothing happened anyway.

We used to have heavy devices usually and after last ones, I still couldn’t get used to hold them. But it’s obvious that these lighter and smaller devices tend to fall more easily and often. I see cracked screens everyday. Probably screen replacement become cheaper and easier and there are more companies providing these services, i’m assuming this is the case, even if it isn’t, it will be soon.

You may wanna check these durability videos: http://youtu.be/pMvE0lkunBg and http://youtu.be/T4kBn-GRw1M

How to display AppStore banner in your web page

If you have an app and you might want to show an app banner when you user visit your page from their mobile safari. For iOS devices, displaying appstore banner is as easy as adding a meta tag to your html page.

How To Implement To Your Website

Add this meta tag to your web page: <meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=your_app_id" />

You need your app’s id (a numeric identifier) which you can get it from iTunesConnect interface.

When you add this meta tag to you page, safari handles the rest and shows the banner. In iPad, it also shows some of the screenshots of your app.