Question

Possible downsides of using RevenueCat without creating products?

  • 14 May 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 27 views
D
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Hi there, we are refactoring the way we do in-app purchases on Google Play, and from the RevenueCat documentation I see that we can use RevenueCat without creating products 1-1 for every Google Play product we have.
 


The information is limited so I wonder: What are the downsides to not defining products in RevenueCat, when we are not using entitlements or offerings?

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2 replies

Ryan Glanz
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Hi,

You could do this but we don’t recommend it. The downsides are:

  1. You need to use the storeProduct method, which is deprecated. It won’t be removed anytime soon, but we won’t provide further development on it. It takes a string identifier of the product, so it is somewhat fragile (it will break if you rename a product in Google, for example).
  2. You can’t attach an entitlement to those purchases (they are attached at the RC product level). So you can’t use RC to determine subscription status of a user.
D
Badge +5

Hi,

You could do this but we don’t recommend it. The downsides are:

  1. You need to use the storeProduct method, which is deprecated. It won’t be removed anytime soon, but we won’t provide further development on it. It takes a string identifier of the product, so it is somewhat fragile (it will break if you rename a product in Google, for example).
  2. You can’t attach an entitlement to those purchases (they are attached at the RC product level). So you can’t use RC to determine subscription status of a user.

Thanks for your response.

Our case is that we have hit the ceiling in Google Play on the number of products we can have, and have switched to using an inapp-product per price. That means multiple products can use the same “price” from Google Play. Hence, we have no reference to the purchased object itself in Google Play or RevenueCat.

Since you don’t seem to have any API for checking if a product already exists (please correct me if I am wrong), and get the product ID of the existing product in RevenueCat, it makes it cumbersome to keep in sync (it’s also impossible to look up the product ID via your interface).

Therefore we are considering just dropping the product in RevenueCat altogether.

Happy to hear any input if you have suggestions for how we can better manage and sync products between Google Play and RevenueCat.

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