DEV Community: Maria Bordunova

How to Create Google Play Promo Codes for Android Apps

Maria Bordunova — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 12:43:53 +0000

Google Play Developer Console offers you a number of tools that help you grow your app business. Promotions are one of them. By using these, you can launch effective acquisition campaigns (and significantly increase your installs metric), partner programs or simply use these codes as incentives (as “thank you” or “sorry” gestures). But before launching such campaigns, you should be aware of how it works and consider the limitations of the Google Play promo codes. So, let’s dive into the technical side.

Prerequisites

To start with promotional codes, you should integrate the Google Play Billing Library into your app. Keep in mind that promotion redemptions can happen outside of your app or even when the app hasn’t been installed yet. It means that your app must handle purchases with promo codes correctly regardless of the app state.

Types of Google Play promo codes

There are two types of Google Play promo codes: one-time and custom codes. The main difference is that one-time codes are automatically generated unique codes that could be used only once by a single person. The custom codes could be named universally (for instance, by name of the event where you promote your app) and used multiple times by multiple users according to your predefined limit. Custom codes are available only for subscriptions.

Once you create a promotion, you can’t change the number of promo codes in that promotion or switch promo codes to a different type. But promo codes created for subscription promotions do not count towards your limit for non-subscription promotions, and vice versa. With that in mind, define your strategy wisely.

How to create Google Play promo codes for your app

1. Open the ‘Promo codes’ tab within Google Play Developer console.

Navigate to Google Play Developer Console and select the ‘All apps’ tab from the menu on the left. Then, select your app from the list. Select the ‘Monetize‘ -> ‘Promo codes‘ tab in the left menu bar.

Click the ‘Create promo code’ button.

2. Specify the details of the promotion.

Name identifies the promo code in Google Play Console. Visible only to you.
Start date must be in the future.
End date must be within one year of the start date.
Details on Google Play promo codes

3. Choose promotion type.

Paid app: Give users a paid app for free with promo code.
In-app product: For non-subscription promotion link an existing in-app product from a drop-down list.
Subscription: For subscription promotion specify an existing subscription and duration of the trial period. Note: If a customer uses a promo code for a subscription that has already a free trial, the promo code will override the original free trial length.

4. Create one-time promo code.

In the group box ‘Code type’, choose ‘One-time codes’. Enter the number of promo codes to be created.

Click on the ‘Save’ button at the right bottom of the page. It’ll open a popup window that notifies you to implement the billing library in your app. Click on ‘Create’ in the window:

After that, you’ll be able to download promo codes as a CSV file:

That’s it! Now you can share these unique numbers via emails or personal event invitations, or simply share them with your support team so they can engage with your users more effectively.

4.1 Create custom promo code.

Enter a unique (per app) custom code using numbers (0-9), lowercase (a-z) and uppercase (A-Z). Also, specify the number of code redemptions:

User redemption flow

Once we set up everything on the Google Developers Console side, let’s take a look at this process from the users’ standpoint. In the examples below, we’ll explore promotional codes for subscriptions.

In-app redemption flow

The user can redeem a promo code as part of the normal purchase flow. Instead of purchasing the product, the user enters the code and gets the product, like a usual in-app purchase.

Start the purchase flow for the product for which you created a promotion.
Specify the Google payment method as ‘Reedem code’:
Enter the promo code and select ‘Redeem’:
If the promo code was entered correctly, a window will appear with the subscription details and the trial duration. User needs to click on ‘Continue’.
The purchase window should open. User should click ‘Subscribe’ there.

Google Play promo codes redemption flow

A user can also redeem a promo code in Google Play:

Open the Google Play app.
Open the menu by clicking the three lines in the left upper corner.
Scroll down and select ‘Redeem’.
Enter the promo code and click ‘Redeem’:
If the promo code was entered correctly, a window will appear with the subscription details and the trial duration. User needs to click ‘Continue’
The purchase window should open. User should click ‘Subscribe’ there.

To save the user from having to enter a promo code, you can generate a URL with it. Share the URL that directs the user to Google Play Store.

URL has the following format: https://play.google.com/redeem?code=promo_code

Accelerate your app promotion strategy with Google Play promo codes

Google Play promo codes are a universal tool for user acquisition and engagement that allows you to launch campaigns even with a limited budget. This is a great tool to increase the number of installs, but to convert these users to subscribers, provide them with great onboarding, and give them their “Aha!” moments as soon as possible.

Google Play promo codes are also a great tool for user engagement and receiving reviews — just send your users a notification with the unique code at the right time and gift them access to the new experience. To find out how to create custom push notifications on Android, read this article.

So there are so many things you should test. To see how your campaigns affect your subscription revenue, use Qonversion analytics tools. Try even more strategies with A/B testing and Automation. And if you still have any questions — we’d be happy to hear from you!

How to Configure Subscriptions on the Web with Stripe and Grant Users Access on iOS and Android

Maria Bordunova — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 10:35:00 +0000

Implementing renewable subscriptions is a daunting task, especially if you haven’t dealt with a third-party payment processors’ APIs like StoreKit, Google Billing Library, Stripe before. And it becomes much harder when you need to support several platforms simultaneously. You’ll find that managing cross-platform subscriptions is challenging as you need to solve technical integration complexity, consider different platforms’ policies and requirements, find the right approach to manage subscription statuses (cancellations, upgrades, downgrades, etc.), and analytics.

At the same time, cross-platform subscription management provides your users with the best user experience on any device anywhere, and allows you to reduce platform fees (15-30% for app stores and 2-3% for Stripe — just feel the difference).

In our previous article, we covered granting access on the web after a purchase was made on iOS and Android platforms. Now let’s dig deeper into the web part and explore how to configure Stripe payments and grant your users premium access on iOS and Android apps.

Connecting Stripe to Qonversion

The first step is to connect Qonversion to your Stripe account. Navigate to your Qonversion project settings. Select Stripe and switch on the Stripe toggle.

This will bring you to the Stripe sign in page. Click Connect if you have an existing Stripe account or create a new one if required. If your Stripe account isn’t activated yet, you need to activate it (add business details, banking information etc).

Setup Stripe Product and Permission

Let’s assume you have already had the Qonversion Product that contains Apple and Google product stores identifiers. If you want to sell a similar product with Stripe, update the existing product in Qonversion with the Stripe product ID.

The Stripe product ID can be found in the Products tab in Stripe Dashboard. Just select the product and copy its ID shown at the top right corner of the page.

Make sure that your Qonversion product is associated with Permission that indicates premium status of a user.

If you want to sell subscriptions only on the web, you can just leave empty the Apple Store and Google Play Product ID fields in the Qonversion product details.

Sending Stripe Purchase Data to Qonversion

You can directly call API methods or use our Web SDK in your web app to send Stripe subscriptions data to Qonversion. Choose the method that is most suitable for you. If you have never worked with API endpoints before, our recommendation is to use Qonversion Web SDK to send Stripe purchases data.

1. API methods

Qonversion provides a high-performance REST API that allows you to create and identify users, send purchases data, get user entitlements, and more. This section of the article covers the methods you should use in order to get cross-platform access based on Stripe purchases.

1.1 Create User

Before you start sending Stripe purchase data, you need to create a user. A user is a cross-platform entity with User object with the following endpoint:

POST https://api.qonversion.io/v3/users/:user_id

User_id is the Qonversion User ID that will be registered for this user. Let’s use the following identifier aa47b6fa as the user_id in this example.

1.2 Identify the User

User Identity allows cross-platform user identification and access management. Identity manages user access based on payments across different platforms. You can find more info about Identity in our documentation.

Identify the user with the Identity method:

POST https://api.qonversion.io/v3/identities/:identity_id

For identity_id always use unique ID values. Otherwise, a user can get matched to another user’s premium status. You can use the user ID from your internal system as identity_id. In our example, we will use stripe_aa47b6fa as the identity_id.

1.3 Send Purchases

Here we get to the most interesting part. Now everything is ready for sending user purchases data to Qonversion. Use the purchases endpoint for this:

POST https://api.qonversion.io/v3/users/:user_id/purchases

Below is the example with the parameters you should forward with the method body:

{
"currency": "USD",
"price": "100",
"purchased": 1659428809,
"stripe_store_data": {
   "subscription_id": "sub_1LSGVgL9K6ILzohYq5GCbktn",
   "product_id": "prod_MAbVQQaljmF6gm"
 }
}

In order to grant users with valid permissions, product_idmust be the same as Stripe Product Identifier that you provided in the previous step to the Qonversion Product annual. Subscription_id is an identifier for a Stripe Subscription object. Description of the rest parameters can be found in our guide on sending Stripe purchases data to Qonversion.

If the purchase was created successfully, the response will be the following:

{
   "currency": "USD",
   "price": "100",
   "purchased": 1659008000,
   "stripe_store_data": {
       "product_id": "prod_MAbVQQaljmF6gm",
       "subscription_id": "sub_1LSGVgL9K6ILzohYq5GCbktn"
   },
   "user_id": "aa47b6fa"
}

You can now check the Customers tab in your Qonversion account looking for your customer. Search is available with Qonversion user_id(aa47b6fa) or identity_id(stripe_aa47b6fa):

And here are the details on customer level that you can quickly see in Qonversion dashboard including price and date of the purchased product:

Once you successfully send the purchase, Qonversion infrastructure handles all subscription changes like renewal, trial conversion, refund etc. This affects user permissions and is reflected in our analytics dashboards.

1.4 Get Entitlements

At this point, you should be able to receive the active permission that was configured in the previous step (Setup Stripe Product and Permission). In our example, this is a permission with a premium ID. Call the following method to check entitlements:

GET https://api.qonversion.io/v3/users/:user_id/entitlements

Below you can see the example with entitlement response:

{
   "data": [
       {
           "active": true,
           "expires": 1690965033,
           "id": "premium",
           "product": {
               "product_id": "annual",
               "subscription": {
                   "current_period_type": "normal",
                   "renew_state": "will_renew"
               }
           },
           "started": 1659429033
       }
   ]
}

2. Web SDK

Web SDK is a TypeScript browser-client SDK that interacts with Qonversion API under the hood. With Qonversion’s Web SDK, you can easily identify users, send purchases, customize user properties, check an entitlement state, but it is still required to receive an entitlement state on the backend side. You can find SDK to be a more flexible and convenient way to share data to Qonversion from your web app.

2.1 Launch Qonversion Web SDK

You can find detailed information on how to launch the SDK in the documentation here. You need to call the Qonversion.initialize method and pass QonversionConfigBuilder as a parameter:

const qonversionInstance = Qonversion.initialize(config);

2.2 Identify the user with Qonversion Web SDK

Identify the user with the identify method:

await qonversionInstance.identify('identity_id');

Always use unique ID values for identity_id. Otherwise, a user can get matched to another user’s premium status. You can use your internal user ID from your system as identity_id. In this example, we will use stripe_aa47b6fa as the identity_id.

2.3 Send purchase

Collect stripe purchase data and call the sendStripePurchase method:

сonst stripePurchaseData: PurchaseCoreData & StripeStoreData = {
  currency: 'USD',
  price: '100',
  productId: 'prod_MAbVQQaljmF6gm',
  purchased: 1659008486,
  subscriptionId: 'sub_1LSGVgL9K6ILzohYq5GCbktn'
};

const purchase = await qonversionInstance.sendStripePurchase(stripePurchaseData);

In order to grant users with valid permissions, product_id must be the same as Stripe Product Identifier from the Qonversion Product annual (see the previous step Setup Stripe Product and Permission). Subscription_id is an identifier for a Stripe Subscription object. Description of the rest parameters can be found in our guide Send Stripe purchases to Qonversion.

If the purchase is created successfully, the response is the following:


{
  currency: 'USD',
  price: '100',
  purchased: 1659008486,
  stripeStoreData: {
    subscriptionId: 'sub_1LSGVgL9K6ILzohYq5GCbktn',
    productId: 'prod_MAbVQQaljmF6gm'
  }
}

You can check the Customers tab in your Qonversion account to see the details of this user. You can use identity_id(stripe_aa47b6fa) to find the customer:

You can see the details on user level including a purchased product price and the date of the purchase:

Once you successfully send the purchase, Qonversion infrastructure handles all subscription states like renewal, trial conversion, refunds etc. It affects user permissions and shows up in analytics as well.

2.4 Get entitlements

At this point, you should get the active permission that was configured in the previous step (Setup Stripe Product and Permission). In our example, this is a permission with a premium ID. Call the getEntitlements method:

const entitlements = await qonversionInstance.getEntitlements();

Get Subscription Status and Unlock Premium Access on Mobile Apps

The last step is to get a subscription status on an iOS or Android mobile app to handle user access. Launch the app and call the identify method:

iOS

Qonversion.identify("identity_id")

Android

Qonversion.identify("identity_id")

Identity ID must be the same you used when identifying the User on the web.

Then call the checkPermissions method:

iOS

Qonversion.checkPermissions { (permissions, error) in
  if let error = error {
    // handle error
    return
  }
  if let premium: Qonversion.Permission = permissions["premium"], premium.isActive {
    // handle the permission
  }
}

Android

Qonversion.checkPermissions(object: QonversionPermissionsCallback {
    override fun onSuccess(permissions: Map<String, QPermission>) {
        val premiumPermission = permissions["premium"]
        if (premiumPermission != null && premiumPermission.isActive()) {
        // handle the permission
        }
    }
    override fun onError(error: QonversionError) {
        // handle error here
    }
})

As you can see here, a mobile apps user has the entitlements (access level) based on his stripe subscription.

Android / iOS

Conclusion

This article demonstrates how to manage users’ access on mobile apps based on their web subscriptions. The implementation is quick and straightforward.

Once you implement cross-platform subscription management, you can easily track the performance of each platform in Qonversion analytics dashboards. Moreover, Qonversion offers a set of tools to leverage your subscription data including integrations, Apple Search Ads attribution, and push notifications.