So far, not a lot of luck making money with apps. So the quest continues. One suggestion to make money was to create a Trial version. Of course, if you are not planning on making money, no Trial is needed. The process seems simple, but somehow I do not have a lot of confidence in how the current mechanism works. They do provide a method, but I find the logic it uses is backwards.
You call a method and it returns a positive if the app is in trial mode. It is left up to the developer to infer that a negative means that the app is paid for. The problem is that a non positive is not necessarily a negative. There may be other reasons the method does not return a positive. What if the service determining the status can not be run? It is the same logic used to imply someone is innocent if they could not be found guilty. Just because something can be proved does not mean the inverse is true.
It would be nice if the logic was improved, but there are many legacy apps using the current model, so there needs to be an alternate method that returns a positive value if the app is paid. Then the inference is on whether the app is a Trial. My preference is to return a token that indicates a given id for the app or an indication that the determination could not be made.
The next step is to work out what to do when you know the app is a Trial. Reduced functionality is one technique another is to add ads. If you are not making money from purchases, you might as well make them from ads. Of course, I would love to have the problem where the ads made more money than purchases.
John Marshall… Visio MVP Visio.MVPs.org
john Visio MVP 