Can you require a yearly upgrade on android apps through market [closed]
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Closed 11 years ago.
Improve this questionI've read through the licensing info about android (http://developer.android.com/guide/publ开发者_StackOverflowishing/licensing.html). I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to require a time-based (in my case yearly) upgrade to an application through market, or another supported mechanism. The app in question works such that the 2010 version is wrong (out of date, inaccurate) in 2011. Is it possible to either force users to pay for an upgrade to the next year's version or if they won't, to disable the app? I'm hoping this is supported functionality. So, I guess there are a few questions here.
- Are paid upgrades supported? If I charge $5 when they buy the app, can I charge them $1 for each upgrade?
- Can you force users to upgrade? .. and if they don't, make the existing version not work.
- Are these features supported by market/licensing? If not, any existing solutions anyone is aware of?
You cannot directly charge for an upgrade, however there are options to get the desired effect. You cannot force users to upgrade but you can disable your application by having it decide itself that it's out of date.
The Android Market supports "in-app purchasing" which includes single-purchase items and consumables. I think your best option might be to have an item purchase which unlocks the application for a given period of time (or until a fixed expiration date). Other than the purchase aspect, this would be entirely managed by your code. Your 2011 application would be perhaps downloaded for free, but not (fully?) functional until its 2011 token has been purchased. In 2012, your application would have to detect that its token has been expired and urge the user to take the update from the market; the new update would know how to purchase the 2012 token and would require it to run past the purchase activity.
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