ZEINA OWEIS: Hi.
My name is Zeina, and I'm a product manager
on the Google Play team.
As a developer for a great Google Play app,
you're probably thinking about how
to cover the cost of your business.
And who doesn't like to make money?
One way to monetize your apps and games
is using one-time purchases.
But you may be able to better monetize
your apps through subscription-based payments.
Subscriptions are great because they
allow you to form this ongoing relationship with your buyers.
Subscriptions are a win-win.
Users sign up for these auto-recurring payments
because they get the same great value at a discounted price.
And in turn, you will get more revenue and more happy buyers.
And subscriptions currently work for apps
across a variety of categories, news apps like "The New York
Times," sports apps like MLB At Bat, and educational games
like those developed by SmartEducation.
And subscriptions on Google Play have been growing,
and they continue to grow quarter over quarter.
Google Play Subscriptions is included in our in-app billing
service, so you will get the same great benefits
you're used to with one-time time purchases,
including global payments and automated
financial reporting and deposits.
So your app never has to directly process
any financial transactions.
On top of that, in-app billing takes
care of the headaches of recurring payments,
so you can focus on building a great service
and a successful business model.
The developer console gives you full control over the pricing
and the billing periods of each subscription product.
Choose the billing period that works best for your service.
We currently support monthly and annual subscriptions,
and soon we'll support weekly and seasonal recurrence
periods as well.
You can offer users multiple options to choose from.
For example, you can create a basic plan
that costs $5 a month and a pro plan that costs $10 a month.
And free trials are a great way to encourage users to try out
the service before committing to the recurring payments.
Consult with your favorite marketing professional.
They'll probably tell you that free trials is the way to go.
When you add a subscription product,
one of the options that you can set
is how long that trial period should last.
Of course, if you do choose to offer a trial period,
the user who signs up won't be charged
until after the trial period has ended.
And like other in-app items, you can
use Version 3 of the in-app billing API
to validate the status of a subscription
when users sign into your service.
GetPurchases will return any active subscription, including
ones in the trial period and also ones
that have been canceled up until the end of that billing period.
You can also fire up a purchase intent by calling GetBuyIntent.
It's used almost the same way as it's used for in-app items.
Just pass Item_Type_Subs with the skew ID
of your subscription product.
The purchase token can be used for synchronizing
the subscription state between your back end
servers and Google Play.
So what about maintaining those subscribers?
Sometimes, they may not be completely satisfied
with the service that you provide them.
If that ever happens, you will soon
be able to offer them a free week or two as a goodwill
gesture.
If you do that, they will be happy
and may continue the subscription.
Even better, when they know that you are practically
compensating them for any unforeseen bad service,
they will spread the word, and you
will get more people to subscribe.
Sadly, they will sometimes still want
to cancel their subscription.
Again, you can do that via the API.
You can cancel the subscription at the end
of their current billing period.
And soon, you will also be able to revoke it immediately
with a full refund.
What if you come up with a new great subscription plan,
or you want your satisfied users to move from, say, the monthly
to the annual plan?
Well, soon you'll be able to easily trigger
a purchase intent for the new subscription plan
and allow users to switch from one tier to the other.
So what's next?
Well, if your app can offer great value
to your users via subscriptions, in-app billing
is as easy to use for subscription-based payments
as it is for one-time payments.
And as I said, when it comes to payments,
there's nothing for you to do.
We process all recurring payments
and deposit them into your designated bank account.
So you get to focus on what you do best, which
is creating beautiful, engaging apps and games.
If you're ready to get started, check out
the documentation on the Developer Help Center.
With the power of Google Play subscriptions,
it's never been easier to create meaningful and long-lasting
relationship with your users.
So go out and build something great,
and thank you for watching.