ilimitado Web Entwickler Blog

Imagine you have just written your new ground breaking android application. It took you weeks developing it because you have to go to work and can just code after quitting time or at the weekends. You finally finished it up and the application works great and it’s roll out time baby.
But should you make it a free or paid app? If you make it a paid app users won’t have the opportunity to review your application before buying it. As a consequence less people will download it (we where analysing this by browsing through the market, listing the download counts of all paid apps…), and advertising also doesn’t make much sense, because the application mainly runs as background service and uses the notification system to interact with the user. But all you know is, that your little application could be very useful to a lot off people and therefore there is no doubt to make it a free app.

The story above might be a little exaggerated, but we have been in a similar situation with our upcoming application. We wanted people to decide on their own what the app is worth and started coding a little framework to bring a donation model to android.

The framework is still in the works and is based on the idea of periodically (i.e. every 50th program launch) showing dialogs to the user via the notification System. A dialog will ask the user to donate some money, to your google checkout account, to support free applications. As soon as the user has donated an arbitrary amount to your checkout account the dialogs will be disabled. How does this work?
The server side framework code will periodically check your email account for google checkout donations from a specific user. If a donation is received a donation code for the user will be generated and the server waits for the next ping from the android application. Applications using the framework will ping donation servers in fixed time intervals to request a donation code. If a code, for the app installed on the device, is available the donation code will be fetched from the server. Once the code is received, it will be compared with the app ID, generated at the first application launch, and if the code matches the dialogs will immediately be disabled. So this is roughly how the framework will operate, but it’s still in development and new ideas are very welcome.

Bottom line, we think this is a very fair donation model, because only users that use the app frequently will be asked to donate some money, while others don’t get harassed. We just didn’t want to make it too aggressively…

But don’t worry, when the framework will be released you will be able to decide in which intervals (time, launch) the dialogs will be shown to the user. Furthermore you will be able to choose between a service running in the background for notifications and showing a dialog every time the user launches the application.