Subscription based model for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry App

Question

Can there be a standard way to handle this in all three platforms? Example would be using a single payment gateway for all. The app(on all platforms) asks for username, password, credit card info then submits to our server. Then our server authenticates and send to a payment gateway. When approved user is allowed to login to the App. Is that a good idea? Will it be allowed on all platforms?

Or does it require different approach for each platform?

Answer 1

On iPhone, this is not allowed. You may not avoid in any way apples standard mechanisms to pay for an app or to make in-app purchases.

There may be cases where an existing (paid) membership for a service might be complemented by a free iPhone app. For example, the free dropbox app will allow you to log in to your (paid) dropbox account. However the dropbox app does not rely on a paid account, it works with free memberships too.

As a rule of thumb: If you could handle payments through the app store, then you propably have to.