Urban Airship’s In-App Purchase for Android Goes Live

This morning, Portland-based Urban Airship commercially launched its In-App Purchasing Product for Android. The company describes the service as a “last mile” offering for developers that simplifies the process of integrating in-app purchasing features within Android applications. The new service is similar to Urban Airship’s in-app purchases services for iOS, which launched just 18 months ago. Since then, the company has enabled over 2.8 million transactions.

Urban Airship says it designed its in-app service for Android while participating in Google’s in-app beta test program, developing its features alongside Google’s in preparation for this launch.

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The new In-App Purchase for Android service offers the following features:

• Dynamic content: The Android Market limits application size to 25 MB, but apps using Urban Airship In-App Purchase can grow beyond that. Developers upload paid and free content to the Urban Airship servers, and those servers deliver the content to the end user when it’s needed.
• Security: Urban Airship validates all purchase receipts before delivering content to the application.
• Versioning and updates: Urban Airship tracks updates to purchasable content and notifies users when updates are available. Developers can fix bugs in their updates without shipping an additional app update.

The program complements UA’s recently launched Push for Android service, launched in March, which offers an alternative to Google’s default solution, C2DM. You can learn more about that service here.

Urban Airship by the Numbers

Urban Airship supports a large number of developers on the iOS, Android and BlackBerry platforms, and serves over 100 million mobile devices. To date, it has delivered over 2.6 billion push notifications in total, at a rate of 15 million push messages per day. Year-over-year, the company says the number of notifications it sends out has increased by 1,555%.

With in-app purchases, as noted above, Urban Airship has delivered over 2.9 million transactions, and its customers make an average of 8,000 in-app purchases per day.

Developers interested in signing up for the new Android service can do so here.

Photo: UA’s In-App Purchases on iOS, Now Coming to Android

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