This topic lists and describes the setup steps you need to take before you can
sell products in your app. At a high level, this setup includes creating a
developer account, creating and configuring the products you want to sell,
and enabling and configuring the APIs that you use to sell and manage your
products. This topic also describes how to configure Real-time developer
notifications to be notified whenever the status of a product changes.
Set up a Google Play developer account
To publish your apps and games on Google Play, use the
Google Play Console
. You also use the Google Play
Console to manage your billing-related products and settings.
To access the Google Play Console, you need to
set up a Google Play Developer Account
.
To sell paid apps and in-app purchases on Google Play, you must also set
up a profile in the
Google Payments Center
and
then link that profile to your Google Play developer account. To learn how
to link your profile to your account, or to learn how to check if you already
have a linked account and profile, see
Link a Google Play developer account to your payments profile
.
Enable billing-related features in the Google Play Console
Once you've set up a developer account, you must publish a version of your
app that includes the Google Play Billing Library. This step is required
to enable billing-related features in the Google Play Console,
such as configuring the products you want to sell.
Add library dependency
To integrate Google Play's billing system, first add a dependency to the
Google Play Billing Library in your app. This library provides access to
Android APIs that connect you to Google Play. From there,
you can access purchase information, query for updates about purchases,
prompt a user to make new purchases, and more.
The Google Play Billing Library is available from
Google's Maven repository
. Add the dependency to your app's
build.gradle
file as shown:
Groovy
dependencies {
def billing_version = "6.2.1"
implementation "com.android.billingclient:billing:$billing_version"
}
Kotlin
dependencies {
val billing_version = "6.2.1"
implementation("com.android.billingclient:billing:$billing_version")
}
If you're using Kotlin, the Play Billing Library KTX module contains
Kotlin extensions and coroutines support that enable you to write
idiomatic Kotlin when using Google Play's billing system. To include these
extensions in your project, add the following dependency to your app's
build.gradle
file as shown:
Groovy
dependencies {
def billing_version = "6.2.1"
implementation "com.android.billingclient:billing-ktx:$billing_version"
}
Kotlin
dependencies {
val billing_version = "6.2.1"
implementation("com.android.billingclient:billing-ktx:$billing_version")
}
The Kotlin code examples found on this page leverage KTX where
possible.
Upload your app
Once you've added the library to your app, build and publish your
app. For this step,
create your app
and then publish to any track, including the
internal test track
.
Create and configure your products
After enabling Google Play Billing features for your app, you need to
configure products to sell.
The steps to create one-time products and subscriptions are similar.
For each product, you need to provide a unique product ID, a title,
a description, and pricing information. Subscriptions have additional
required information, such as selecting whether it's an auto-renewing or prepaid
renewal type for the base plan.
The Google Play Console provides a web interface that you can use to
manage your products.
As an alternative to the web interface, you can also manage your products by using the
inappproducts
REST resource for in-app products and the
monetization.subscriptions
REST resource for subscription products
in the Google Play Developer API.
Configure the Google Play Developer API
The Google Play Developer API is a server-to-server API that complements
the Google Play Billing Library on Android. This API provides functionality
not available in the Google Play Billing Library, such as securely
verifying purchases and issuing refunds to your users.
As part of integrating Google Play's billing system into your app, you must
configure access to the Google Play Developer API through the Google Play
Console. For instructions, see
Getting Started with Google Play Developer API
.
Once you've configured access to the Google Play Developer API, be sure that
you've granted the
View financial data
permission, which is needed to
access billing-related functionality. For information on best practices,
along with more information on configuring permissions, see
Add developer account users and manage permissions
.
Real-time developer notifications (RTDN) is a mechanism to receive
notifications from Google whenever there is a change in a user's entitlement
within your app. RTDN leverages the use of
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
, which
allows you to receive data that is either pushed to a URL that you set or is
polled using a
client library
.
These notifications allow you to react immediately to subscription state
changes, avoiding the need to poll the Google Play Developer API.
Note that inefficient use of the Google Play Developer API can lead to API
quota restrictions.
Cloud Pub/Sub
is a fully-managed
real-time messaging service that you can use to send and receive messages
between independent applications. Google Play uses Cloud Pub/Sub
to publish push notifications on topics to which you subscribe.
To receive notifications, you need to create a backend server to
consume the messages sent to your topic. Your server can then consume
these messages by responding to HTTPS requests to a registered endpoint
or by using the
Cloud Pub/Sub Client Libraries
.
These libraries are available in a variety of languages. More information can
also be found in the
Create a Pub/Sub subscription
section in this topic.
Determine pricing and quotas
For details on pricing and quotas, refer to
pricing
and
quotas
.
Estimate data usage
The data portion of the subscription notification is approximately
1KB of data per request. Each publish and pull requires a separate
request, or approximately 2KB of data per notification. The number
of notifications per month depends on your billing cycle and your
users' behavior. You should expect
at least
one notification for
each user during a billing cycle.
Setup Cloud Pub/Sub
To enable Real-time developer notifications, you must first set up
Cloud Pub/Sub using your own Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project and then
enable the notifications for your app.
To use Cloud Pub/Sub, you must have a GCP project with the Cloud
Pub/Sub API enabled. If you are not familiar with GCP and Cloud Pub/Sub, see
the
Quickstart guide
.
Create a topic
To start receiving notifications, you must create a
topic
to which Google Play should publish the notifications. To create a
topic, follow the instructions in
Create the topic
.
Create a Pub/Sub subscription
To receive messages published to a topic, you must create a Pub/Sub
subscription to that topic. To create a Pub/Sub subscription, do the
following:
- Read the
Cloud Pub/Sub Subscriber Guide
to determine whether to configure the subscription as either a
push
subscription
or a
pull subscription
.
- A push subscription allows Cloud Pub/Sub to send notifications to
your secure backend by issuing HTTPS requests.
- A pull subscription requires your secure backend server to initiate
requests to the Cloud Pub/Sub server to retrieve messages.
- Follow the instructions in
Add a subscription
to create a subscription.
Grant publish rights on your topic
Cloud Pub/Sub
requires that you grant
Google Play privileges to publish notifications to your topic.
- Open the
Google Cloud Console
.
- Select your project, and then click
Pub/Sub
in the left-hand navigation.
Find your topic, and open the permissions details.
Add the service account
google-play-developer-notifications@system.gserviceaccount.com
, and
grant it the role of
Pub/Sub Publisher
.
Click
Save
to complete the topic set up.
Enable Real-time developer notifications for your app
To enable Real-time developer notifications for your app, do the following:
- Open the
Google Play Console
.
- Select your app.
- Go to
Monetize > Monetization setup
.
Scroll to the
Real-time developer notifications
section at the top
of the page.
Check
Enable real-time notifications
.
In the
Topic name
field, enter the full Cloud Pub/Sub topic name that
you configured earlier. The topic name should be in the format of
projects/{project_id}/topics/{topic_name}
where
project_id
is the
unique identifier for your project, and
topic_name
is the name of the
topic created earlier.
Click
Send Test Message
to send a test message. Performing a test
publish helps to ensure that everything is set up and configured properly.
If the test publish succeeds, a message is displayed stating that the test
publish was successful. If you have attached a subscription for this topic,
you should receive the test message.
For a pull subscription, go to the subscription in Cloud Console, click
View Messages
, and proceed to pull messages. You should acknowledge any
message you have pulled to avoid repeated delivery by Cloud Pub/Sub. For a
push subscription
, check if
the test message is delivered to your push endpoint. A successful response
code will serve as a message acknowledgement.
If the publish fails, an error is shown. Ensure that the topic name is
correct and that the
google-play-developer-notifications@system.gserviceaccount.com
service
account has
Pub/Sub Publisher
access to the topic.
Choose which notification types you'd like to receive.
- Get notifications for subscriptions and all voided purchases
- receive
real-time developer notifications related to subscriptions and voided
purchases. You won't receive notifications for one-time product purchases.
- Get all notifications for subscriptions and one-time products
- receive
notifications for all subscription and voided purchase events. You'll also
receive one-time product purchase events, such as
ONE_TIME_PRODUCT_PURCHASED
and
ONE_TIME_PRODUCT_CANCELED
. See
One-time purchase lifecycle
to
learn more about these purchase events.
Click
Save changes
.
Verifying your configuration
To receive Real-time developer notifications, you should create a secure
backend server to consume the messages sent to your Cloud Pub/Sub topic.
You can test your configuration by using the
Send Test Message
button in
the Google Play Console as described in the previous section. If you have not
configured a backend server to consume notifications, you can use the
gcloud
command line tool to verify the configuration. For instructions on
processing messages using
gcloud
, see
Pull the message from the subscription
.
Next steps