Good news for app developers and app users: Google has announced that soon you’ll have more payment options when buying apps and in-app purchases on Google Play Store. The platform is home to more than 2 million apps, a lot of which also have various micro-transactions and purchases going on within them. Apps and games sell subscriptions, items, or services so payment options are pretty important within the platform. Having more options for payments will be convenient for both developers and users.
Google announced at the I/O 2021 conference that there will be more ways to pay in the Google Play Store in the next few months. XDA Developers says they will be baking in new features that will allow different kinds of payments and they’ll be doing this all throughout the year. Last year, they were able to add 34 new payment methods across 30 different markets around the world but they didn’t specifically say if they will surpass that this year.
Some of the methods they mentioned include multi-quantity purchases which will let users buy multiple items at once from the cart. There will also be multi-line subscriptions which will let developers sell multiple products as part of a subscription. Lastly, they will be introducing prepaid plans which will let users access content for a specific time period. These are just some of the options that users and developers will have in the future.
Many of the changes will be part of the Google Play Billing Library 4.0 which is already available for developers. They will also need to update their apps to version 3.0 as the deadline is August 2 for new apps while new app updates will have to do so by November. If developers will adapt these new options, we’ll probably see these applied to apps in the next few months so we’ll have to wait for the early adapters.
A lot of new and mostly exciting things for Google app developers and apps themselves are set to roll out in the next few months. So having more ways to monetize these apps and games and to pay for them within the Google Play Store is important.
