Android In-app purchases

Question

I'm trying to develop a parking application in which the user can pay for the parked time. I went through this document on In-app products and confused how to do the payment. Right now we have planned to do the payments via a third party gateway called "creditcall". Will google play allow this?

Answer 1

No you cannot use 3rd-party gateways, you must use Google's ip-app purchase system. They recently updated their terms of use.

Developers offering additional content, services or functionality within another category of app downloaded from Google Play must use Google Play’s in-app billing service as the method of payment, except:

• where payment is primarily for physical goods or services (e.g. buying movie tickets, or buying a publication where the price also includes a hard copy subscription); or
• where payment is for digital content or goods that may be consumed outside of the application itself (e.g. buying songs that can be played on other music players).

Source: https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html

Answer 2

This is the key document from Google: https://play.google.com/intl/en/about/developer-content-policy.html. The current version goes like this (bolding mine):

In-app purchases:

• Developers offering virtual goods or currencies within a game downloaded from Google Play must use Google Play's in-app billing service as the method of payment.

• Developers offering additional content, services or functionality within another category of app downloaded from Google Play must use Google Play's in-app billing service as the method of payment, except:

  1. where payment is primarily for physical goods or services (e.g., buying movie tickets, or buying a publication where the price also includes a hard copy subscription); or
  2. where payment is for digital content or goods that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g., buying songs that can be played on other music players).

The exception in second point is worth exploring further. If your service or digital content is available outside of the app, it can be sold through other payment providers. Example would be: Skype credit, Spotify subscription, additional features available both on your web and app client. But if the in-app purchase is linked only to the app, Google Wallet must be used.

Hope this helps.