2011/10/7 Jay Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com>om>:
Agreed, for
other reasons as well (donation options should be easily
discoverable by any user). In-app payments in Android are pretty
user-friendly, and I think are the right model here. :-)
They are?
Perhaps I've missed something big...
(Oh: you said "user-friendly")
Yeah. In-app billing is a feature of the Android Market platform and
described here:
http://developer.android.com/guide/market/billing/billing_overview.html
Checkouts are managed by Google, so no need in this case to implement
a whole payments backend. Of course that's what the 30% fee is charged
for. The terms state that it's limited to "digital goods" which is the
kind of clause that you could drive a truck through. Looks like some
folks are using it for donations and "selling" thank you messages.
If we do this, we'd want to have a direct line w/ Google to clarify
that it's OK, and ideally persuade them to waive the fee out of their
love for Wikipedia. :-)
There are alternatives such as PayPal's mobile payment libraries:
https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/products/mobile-payment-libraries?view=…
Apple does still (as far as I can tell) explicitly prohibit in-app
donations, which caused a fair amount of controversy last year.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/nonprofit-developer-apples-no-don…
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate