In App Purchase Tips

Posted July 22nd, 2010 by Shane

Recently I spent some time adding In App Purchase to Mathemagics 2.0. The Apple documentation covering In App Purchase (IAP) is quite good so I’m not going to cover a lot of the low-level technical details. I do however, want to enumerate some lessons learned. Things I would do again and others that I would do differently.

StoreKit is the workhorse underlying In App Purchase. It handles the details of an IAP transaction starting with retrieving product details all the way to transaction processing. Fulfillment on the other hand is up to you. Your app will be notified if a transaction was successful, or if it failed, and it’s up to you to make sure your user gets the content or feature that they purchased. Therein lies the first tip, which is clearly documented in the dev docs but in an easily overlooked way.

Tip 1 – Add your SKPaymentTransactionObserver as soon as the app launches. The transaction payment observer will watch for completed transactions and notify you to deliver the goods. StoreKit transactions are persistent. So, even if your app quits in the middle of a transaction it will still be notified upon next launch that a transaction has been completed. Thus, you need to add your transaction observer right away in order to catch any completed but not yet notified transactions.

Tip 2 –

Tip 3 –

Tip 4 –

Tip 5 –

Tip Summary

  1. Add your SKPaymentTransactionObserver as soon as the app launches.
  2. Tip 2

Good Luck with your In App Purchase efforts.

Until Next Time.

A new look

Posted February 19th, 2010 by Shane

Hello, and welcome to the completely redesigned Blue Lightning Labs website. I am really excited about the new look and company logo. We worked long and hard with Ben Lew on the design, it was a lot of fun and I hope that you like it. The site is still a little sparse at the moment but I have big plans to rapidly expand the product and support pages along with lots of other new content.

The company blog is also a new addition for Blue Lightning Labs and I have to say it is one of the new items that I’m most excited about. I’ll be using the blog to provide a behind the scenes look at the company. This will include updates on our latest projects, industry opinions, and iPhone development. It’s sure to be a lot of fun.

There are also several options for staying in touch. First there’s the RSS feed that you should subscribe to if you want to stay in the loop with the blog. We are also pretty active on Twitter and you can give us a follow here. Our Facebook fan page is a new addition that we’re trying to get a handle on and you can fan us here. Finally, we are putting together a newsletter for product announcements and tips. We’re using Mailchimp to manage the list. They are very concerned with staying on the right side of email usage which is why we chose them. We absolutely keep all information private because, well, we hate email spam as much as you do. You can sign up for our infrequent newsletters at the bottom of this page.

Until next time.