InAppBillingPlugin VS purchases-ios

Over the years I have created several apps that I am super proud of, and for the most part, I have always put them out for free onto the app stores. More recently I have been experimenting with different monetization strategies for the apps so users can unlock features or just leave a tip. For the longest time I kept things simple with a "non-consumable" one-time purchase. The strategy is straight forward, they either purchased the item or they didn't. Based on this information you would unlock the features in the app. My nifty InAppBilling .NET plugin for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows comes in super handy and makes it just a few lines of code to implement this logic. Over the holiday break I decided to take things a step further and dip my toes into the world of subscriptions, and what I found left my code in a complete state of madness! Before I go into details on how I decided to implement subscriptions, I recommend listening to our recent Merge Conflict episode all about subscriptions!

For XF there is a amazing plugin by james montenegro: https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/InAppBillingPlugin

RevenueCat — Hosted backend for in-app purchases and subscriptions (iOS and Android). Free up to $2.5k/mo in tracked revenue.

You got it! Yea, I can't promise everything will work perfectly with all those other platforms, but I will promise that I believe we have the best handling out there. We have 10+ engineers fielding issues from 1000s of developers every month and incrementally improving.

We try to collect as little data as possible, but we use RevenueCat for handling the IAP. We currently use it with anonymous (randomly generated) IDs and don't save additional attribution metadata, so we try to be as privacy-friendly as is possible with this setup.

For IAPs, RevenueCat is one of the simplest setup that exists for React Native. And they have an expo plugin. But having this expo management workflow is the first thing you want to do. https://www.revenuecat.com/

Alternatively you could use RevenueCat which would handle receipt validation for you. I haven’t used it personally but everyone seems to sing its praises.

There are services out there like revenuecat (disclaimer: I have no connection with them, other than being a satisfied customer) that help make these things easier. I recommend looking into them if you’re struggling to wrap your head around it on your own, apple’s documentation can be pretty hard to decipher at times.

I'm Josh Holtz, the author of this article. You might now me from my lead maintainer role of fastlane, creator of Indie Dev Monday, and founder of the new Deep Dish Swift conference ☺️ But I also work at RevenueCat to help developers make more money by making in-app purchases and subscriptions easier!

I have integrated RevenueCat in my previous Startup Fitenium to manage subscriptions, and it was one of the best decisions. Instead of having to integrate both Apple and Google play SDK for subscriptions, with RevenueCat I simply integrated their SDK, which is well documented and much easier to work with. Everything else is magically managed by RevenueCat behind the scenes, to properly handle the payments, users, and analytics.

RevenueCat — Hosted backend for in-app purchases and subscriptions (iOS and Android). Free up to $10k/mo in tracked revenue.