In-App Billing on Android Market: Ready for Testing

We announced our plan to introduce Android Market In-app Billing this quarter. We’re pleased to let you know that we will be launching In-app Billing next week.

In preparation for the launch, we are opening up Android Market for upload and end-to-end testing of your apps that use In-app Billing. You can now upload your apps to the Developer Console, create a catalog of in-app products, and set prices for them. You can then set up accounts to test in-app purchases. During these test transactions, the In-app Billing service interacts with your app exactly as it will for actual users and live transactions.

Note that although you can upload apps during this test development phase, you won’t be able to actually publish the apps to users until the full launch of the service next week.

To get you started, we’ve updated the developer documentation with information about how to set up product lists and test your in-app products. Also, it is absolutely essential that you review the security guidelines to make sure your billing implementation is secure.

We encourage you start uploading and testing your apps right away.

In-app Billing Launched on Android Market

Today, we’re pleased to announce the launch of Android Market In-app Billing to developers and users. As an Android developer, you will now be able to publish apps that use In-app Billing and your users can make purchases from within your apps.

In-app Billing gives you more ways to monetize your apps with try-and-buy, virtual goods, upgrades, and other billing models. If you aren’t yet familiar with In-app Billing, we encourage you to learn more about it.

Several apps launching today are already using the service, including Tap Tap Revenge by Disney Mobile; Comics by ComiXology; Gun Bros, Deer Hunter Challenge HD, and WSOP3 by Glu Mobile; and Dungeon Defenders: FW Deluxe by Trendy Entertainment.

To try In-app Billing in your apps, start with the detailed documentation and complete sample app provided, which show how to implement the service in your app, set up in-app product lists in Android Market, and test your implementation. Also, it’s absolutely essential that you review the security guidelines to make sure your billing implementation is secure.

Application Stats on Android Market

On the Android Market team, it’s been our goal to bring you improved ways of seeing and understanding the installation performance of your published applications. We know that this information is critical in helping you tune your development and marketing efforts. Today I’m pleased to let you know about an important new feature that we’ve added to Android Market called Application Statistics.

Application Statistics is a new type of dashboard in the Market Developer Console that gives you an overview of the installation performance of your apps. It provides charts and tables that summarize each app’s active installation trend over time, as well as its distribution across key dimensions such as Android platform versions, devices, user countries, and user languages. For additional context, the dashboard also shows the comparable aggregate distribution for all app installs from Android Market (numbering in the billions). You could use this data to observe how your app performs relative to the rest of Market or decide what to develop next.

To start with, we’ve seeded the application Statistics dashboards with data going back to December 22, 2010. Going forward, we’ll be updating the data daily.

We encourage you to check out these new dashboards and we hope they’ll give you new and useful insights into your apps’ installation performance. You can access the Statistics dashboards from the main Listings page in the Developer Console.

Watch for more announcements soon. We are continuing to work hard to deliver more reporting features to help you manage your products successfully on Android Market.