Google I/O 22 Announcements - RC Product Priorities

A
  • Anonymous
  • 0 replies

What features are you the most excited about?
What would you like to learn more about?

Many updates and changes have been introduced during Google I/O 22 and our team is busy deep diving into these topics and prioritizing them according to your needs. We would love to hear your thoughts and needs on these features.
 

  • New Subscription Model - is it all clear what that means or would you rather we just take care of it? 
  • Play Console – how does your setup look after the changes? does this create an opportunity for your app?
  • Flexible Offers - would you see yourself making a use of this? 
  • Prepaid plans - does this solve an issue for you? would you like to learn more about the payment landscape of recurring payments? 
  • Play Index - do you see yourself using the index moving forwards? If so, what kinds of communications would you expect from RevenueCat?


Excited to hear from you!

62 replies

P
Userlevel 1
Badge +4

Can you give us a rough ETA? like 2 weeks, 2 months?!

cody
Rank
Userlevel 6
Badge +8

Hey @Gabriel Reis and @Manuel Briand 👋

RevenueCat continues to support Google Play subscriptions just as before - you are safe to keep creating subscription products and attach a single offer at a time (for example, a free trial). The new subscription features include attaching multiple offers to a single product, but this is not supported at this time.

Fortunately, Google Play adds a “Backwards Compatible” badge to features that are still supported with prior implementations. As long as your products and offers indicate that they are backwards compatible, you’re good to go from a RevenueCat perspective.

We don’t have an ETA yet for supporting the new features, but it’s worth noting that it’s definitely top of mind for us here at RevenueCat, and we’ll provide updates as we have them!

M
Badge +3

Hello Anna,

Do you know when the free trial intro offers will work?

Manuel

G
Badge +1

This update is very important. We are waiting for the New Subscription Model

M
Userlevel 3
Badge +3

Hey all, 

We totally hear you… this update is our top priority for Android. Due to the complexity of the updates, we want to be sure we take our time getting the implementation right. We will be beginning work on the update next week, but we still don’t have an ETA on the completion. We’ll update this thread as soon as we do. 

@renchap thank you for the excellent description, you’re totally correct. We’ll keep your merging/handling of legacy subscriptions in mind as we finalize our implementation plans.

A

Happy Q3 everyone! 

As promised we have prioritized and now began working on the New Google Subscription Model. 
No ETA on launch date yet but we will keep you posted.
We might have some edge care scenario questions while implementation in which case I will ask your help. 

Thank you for your patience and have a great rest of the week!

 

J
Badge +4

Just wanted to show my support for the RevenueCat team here - can’t imagine what a massive task this change must be to accommodate. I’ve had a look, some of these API changes that Google have foisted on the world are bonkers, and make things way harder to work with.

As a developer I have some insight into how much work this will involve, how much stress you must be under to get this right, how much testing will be needed, etc. For people here who are not developers, I guarantee you it’s more than you think. I also know how difficult (arguably impossible) it is to estimate how long it will take to make these changes. Again, this is only something that developers will appreciate - when creating some new and complicated functionality there are always, always unforeseen issues and edge cases which arise which significantly delay plans, so I can understand the hesitancy to provide an ETA, especially given that there is no functionality lost here - we can still do everything we used to. It’s just that brand new Play functionality is not yet supported. So personally I’m happy to be patient and just wait for a solid, tested solution when it’s ready and not a half-baked, rushed solution.

So, thanks RevenueCat for supporting my 1-person microbusiness and shielding me from the unholy hot mess that is in-app billing which Google and Apple inflicted on the world. I seriously wouldn’t have been able to make my app without you. Good luck in making these changes and let me buy you a round of beers when it’s done.

G
Badge +4

@AnnaToro  I’m in the process of integrating subscriptions in my app for the first time and I’m wondering if I should wait for RevenueCat to support the new subscription model or to go with what is currently supported.
With the new model it looks like you can have one subscription and multiple plans, so for example you could have a subscription called “Premium” and “Monthly” and “Annual” plans.
I tried that and it didn’t work with RevenueCat, so I created 2 separate subscriptions, one for the “Monthly” plan and another for the “Annual” plan and that worked.

Do you have any idea when the new model will be supported? Do you see any benefits on waiting and use the new model? Is Google doing this to make it easier to the user to switch plans?

 

C
Badge +3

We look forward to new features as soon as possible. This is important

A

Thank you so much for your responses, I really appreciate it. It helps us prioritize.

Our team is currently scoping the size of the change on our end for the ‘New Subscription Model’ and hopefully I can share a rough ETA shortly. It seems like this is what is top of your mind as well. 

In the meantime if you have any further thoughts or questions on the other features, feel free to drop a comment here. 
 

renchap
Userlevel 1
Badge +4

What should we be putting as the “Base Plan ID” on our new products that we create post-changes?

After struggling a bit about this, I found this working:

  • For each of your plans (monthly, yearly…) create a subscription in the Play Console. The subscription ID will be the product identifier you use in RevenueCat
  • In each of those subscriptions, create one base plan. This plan ID is not yet used anywhere in RevenueCat. It should be indicated as “backwards compatible” in the plans list. You can create an offer for this plan, and it should be indicated as “backwards compatible” as well
  • If you create multiple plans or offers, only the one marked as “backwards compatible” will be used by RevenueCat, the others ignored

We are planning to launch our app in the coming weeks and are a bit uneasy to have to create multiple subscriptions in the Play Console as this will force us to merge or handle those legacy subscriptions in the future, but I guess there is no other choice yet.

N
Badge +3

I’m trying to implement https://docs.revenuecat.com/docs/android-products for https://getnofilter.com.

I also got blocked by these temporal changes.

If you have any ETA (2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years), will be super useful, in order to prioritize my backlog.

 

Thank you a lot!

A

Hello Saku and others who might feel frustrated about this,


We hear you and we feel that the best thing we can do is to be totally transparent.

Updating the Google Subscription Model is our Q3 priority within the Catforms team.
The UI update came from a different team and we hope you are happy with that, if not please leave us a feedback.

We have started this update in the beginning of July as we first wrapped up another project that you will hear about next week.

This update is rather a major refactor on our end, as data models and the relationships between them have changed. With these changes, we want to be sure we can continue to support all the features you expect from RevenueCat.

For instance, Google has made it trickier to determine which base plan (product ID) was purchased. We are currently working on a POC for a workaround we feel good about, so that you can see the proper product and price associated with each purchase.
We are doing our best to keep you happy and continue to put out quality work. We do appreciate feedback and pushing us. In case you feel like digging into this last issue you can read more here:

https://github.com/android/play-billing-samples/issues/547
https://github.com/android/play-billing-samples/issues/538
https://github.com/android/play-billing-samples/issues/548

In case you are up for helping, please schedule a call with us, which is the best way to support us at any stage.

Please continue to share your feedback with us, we really appreciate it.

Have a great rest of the week, and as always, we will keep you posted.

Platforms Features Team (Catforms)

rohovdmytro
Badge +6

Cmon, 2 months should be enough to create the decisive clarity. It’s a money management service, smth vital. I’m absolutely sure it’s a damn-hard task to solve. And it would be harder for me to solve independently.
 

The most important topics here for me is: can I tight my businesses with your service or not. Will you be able to solve every problem with a good-enough-eta.

So there is a problem with pricing. Can it be solved? Is that is blocked by some unknown variables? Blocked is the blocker? Can that be solved? When the ETA for the new information? In a bad case scenario can some workaround be created? If yes, what should be required? In a worst case scenarios, what functionality will we loose?  Have you contacted Google through official channels? What did they say?Have you contacted Google through unofficial channels? What did they say?

What is not cool:

​​​​​​New UI instead of solving a new problem. Also it’s not cool to hear that ‘it’s a separate team, so it’s not a big deal’. Instead of spending 2-team-resources solving a vital problem there is one team solving a vital problem. From my perspective,  I have no idea of your internal structure, so I’m sure from inside you have plenty or reasons to do what you do.

Maybe it make sense to redistribute resources?

Summary
- too little concrete clarity after too much time passed
- lack of certainty in the service due to observable lack of pace

It might be a harsh feedback. I still like RevenueCat and wish you all the best. I would be happy to pay you while receiving a solid confidence with a such nasty task as billing.

A

Update here and an open invitation to our closed beta test → 

 

G
Badge

Hi there,

I’m curious. Right now, we’re advised not to make multiple base plans for our subscription. In the future, when this is supported, will this fix the problem where some users are able to subscribe to both monthly/yearly subscriptions (and be double charged) for the same product? We have this issue and are looking for solutions.

J
Userlevel 2
Badge +3

What should we be putting as the “Base Plan ID” on our new products that we create post-changes?

C
Userlevel 1
Badge +2

We are waiting for it

M
Userlevel 3
Badge +3

@Maddie Does purchases-android v6 also support Observer Mode when using Billing Client 5? The migration guide doesn’t mention Observer Mode at all.

Thanks for pointing that out. I’ll get the guide updated. But yes, v6 supports observer mode as well.

A
Badge +2

hi, is there an estimated release date?

S
Badge +5

Too slow RevenueCat. :( Is it just me that feels like that? 

 

I mean, This is what you should be focusing on. Being the best and COMPLETE subscription service for App Store- and Google Play-stores. Now 2 months after the new release of Google you have barely started to implement the changes.

 

With all do respect, I have liked your service a lot, but keep up with the updates by Google and Apple. All the rest is secondary (like the new UI that was released today for the revenuecat-console..).

C
Badge +3

Unfortunately, time is running out now and we will have to leave you. For this reason, we do not move many new applications to revenuecat. If you don't give a clear release date, escape is inevitable.

Jacob Eiting
Rank
Userlevel 3
Badge +5

Google did some truly boneheaded stuff and didn’t include clear pricing information so we probably need to rebuild all the price collection hacks we do on iOS. It’s not trivial. 

We’re working on it, I can say that. It’s not just on a someday roadmap.

It’s probably more likely months than weeks. It’s complicated and unless Google extends their API, we’re gonna have to build a lot of stuff to support it properly. Sorry, wish it could be different.

 

We are about to change subscription prices in some countries due to inflation. One of the new features Google Play now supports is changing subscription prices just for new users - so existing users keep the old subscription prices. Is this supported by RevenueCat already? Or will we see wrong numbers in RevenueCat when doing that?

I’m not certain, I’ve opened a ticket. As long as the old subscriptions endpoint reports the right price it will work.

 

Is it possible to be more explicit in the docs on the Android section to include supported libraries (as highlighted this thread in github)?

It would be good to have it called out on the SDK docs that only version `4.x.x` of Google Play’s billing client is supported. 

Good point! I added a note.

M
Userlevel 3
Badge +3

Hey @sven good news — subscription price changes should report in RevenueCat as expected (only updating the price for new customers). I’ve confirmed that the V1 endpoint will report the old price for customers that purchased before a price change. Let me know if you have further questions.

F
Badge +5

Hey @sven good news — subscription price changes should report in RevenueCat as expected (only updating the price for new customers). I’ve confirmed that the V1 endpoint will report the old price for customers that purchased before a price change. Let me know if you have further questions.

Hey @Maddie I hope you’re doing well,

When I open a subscription to change its pricing or other settings, I get a warning in the Google Play Console that “This subscription has been migrated from a legacy subscription and is read-only. You can make this subscription editable. This means that you will no longer be able to configure or update this subscription through the InAppProducts API.”

In this case what should I do? Make the subscription editable or not?

Thank you for your help.

 

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