2011/10/7 Jay Ashworth jra@baylink.com:
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=o...
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-dona...