Hello, everyone. It's Angela from the App Brewery here again. 1
And in this module, we're going to learn all about In-App Purchases and how to implement them 2
for our apps to start earning extra bucks for all of the apps that you make. Now, if you ever played any sort 3
of game on the iPhone, you should be familiar with in-app purchases as well. 4
A lot of apps will push them heavily onto you. And you can buy a whole wide range of in-app 5
purchases from gems, the time, the energy, the coins, and, basically, everything that you can imagine. 6
Now, the most important thing to notice about in-app purchases is that they are virtual. 7
So essentially, it doesn't cost you any money 8
when a user purchases one of these in-app purchases. It's only digital bits and bytes being moved around 9
on Apple's servers and it's not something that you have to provide like an actual physical T-shirt that 10
you're selling them or sending them an Uber car driver who'll drive them around. 11
And this is why Apple has the privilege of charging you 30% of everything you make through in-app 12
purchases. 13
So if you charge a pound, they'll take 30p. If you charge a dollar, they'll take 30 cents, essentially. 14
Now, it's really important that you remember that. In-app purchases are only for virtual products and 15
all virtual products that you sell through the App Store has to go through Apple, and therefore, you have 16
to pay them the 30%. 17
It's a little bit like a Mafia protection money. 18
But, anyways, let's move on. 19
So why do we need in-app purchases anyways? 20
Well, because it's a really good way of increasing conversions on your free apps. 21
So this allows you to put out your apps for free, 22
making it more tempting and easier for users to download your app, giving it a go, and seeing what the 23
features are before you start charging them for, say, premium features or to remove ads. And in-app purchases 24
work extremely well. 25
This is one of the reasons why if you search on the App Store and you look at the top grossing iPhone 26
apps, you can see that pretty much all of them are free to download, 27
but they all include in-app purchases 28
every single one of these, usually. And that is how they make big bucks. 29
So the best way of implementing in-app purchases, from my experience, is giving the user about 80 percent 30
of all the functionality of your app for free, and only then put up a pay wall where they have to pay 31
to get an in-app purchase to upgrade to the premium version or to remove ads, or whatever it is that 32
gets them that last 20% out of your app. 33
This is what has worked really well in a lot of other apps including one of my favorite which is called 34
Overcast. 35
It is one of the best podcast apps out there. Hands down. And the developer is a really cool guy called 36
Marco and he's an incredible developer, but he's also managed to implement this 80:20 with a paywall 37
in a middle type of strategy really well. 38
So check out the app and see how he implements these in-app purchases. 39
Now, before we get started adding in-app purchases to our app, there are two things that you have to have 40
before you can actually even run or test the code. 41
First thing is you need a full Apple developer program and you have to enroll on this program before 42
you can start adding in-app purchases to your apps in Xcode and start testing them. 43
So this means that you stop paying them $99 per year and, ideally, you are close to releasing 44
your app. 45
Now, the other requirement is that you have to have a physical iPhone device to test in-app purchases. 46
Even if you write all of the code right, 47
it just won't work on the simulator, and it doesn't tell you very explicitly that it's not working because 48
you're running on a simulator. 49
So just be aware you need a full Apple developer account and you need to have a physical iPhone device 50
to test it on. 51
It doesn't have to be the latest or the greatest. 52
It just has to be one that can run and side load your apps. 53
So, now let's check out what we'll build by the end of this module. 54
So this is a really simple app which will display a table view of motivational quotes for the user, and 55
they get 6 for free when they download the app for free. 56
And then there's another six or however many you want to put in there that are hidden behind the paywall 57
and they have to purchase an in-app purchas in order to view the rest of the quotes. 58
So when they tap on Buy, then they will be a pop-up and they'll have to enter their Apple ID and password. 59
And once they've been charged, then you give them access to the rest of the content 60
or whatever other content you want to give them. 61
So in the process, we're going to be looking at how you restore in-app purchases, how you make purchases, 62
and how you detect 63
once they've been successful or if there are any errors. And so by the end of this module, you should 64
understand how to implement in-app purchases for any future app that you decide to build and be able 65
to listen for when the purchase has gone through successfully so that you can enable the premium features 66
in your app and give your users access to more of your app. 67
All right. 68
So I hope you're as excited as I am about this tutorial. 69
So once you're ready, 70
head over to the next lesson and we'll get started.