I would like to help out this guy, but his question is clearly about making/publishing an app. Is there maybe some way his question could be edited to be relevant to the site?

@DanHulme And unfortunately he cannot follow your invitation to our chat room due to lack of rep...

@Izzy he doesn't have enough rep on our site, but he does on some other SE sites

@DanHulme Oh – OK, I didn't check that. And right, "on any site" suffices :)

I checked before I posted the comment :-)

I'm here (after much trouble getting here). How can I ask this question in a better way to make it relevant? Otherwise, is there a more appropriate SE site I should use?

@DanHulme I'm here now.

hi

short answer: no, you can't do what you request in an open-source app

to do in-app purchases, the app needs an access token issued by Google Play, and anybody else could read that out of the source

worse yet, Google Play IAPs don't actually control any content: they just let your app trigger the purchase of a particular item, and tell you that such-and-such Google account has purchased such-and-such items, so the app would still have to download these files from some server, and the URL would have to be inside the app

I think SO is the only place where your question might be on-topic, but questions of the form "I'm not a developer and I need a developer's advice to understand how this app idea might work" aren't super popular there

I feel like your question could be edited to fit this site, because I've often answered questions like "I'm a user, and I'm curious about whether app developers can do X" before. I'm just not sure in this case if I can make an edit that keeps the parts of the question that are important to you.

Thanks, @DanHulme . That answers my question, so I'll probably close my original question I posted.

I think your best bet for what you want is just to sell the files through your website instead of the app, and maybe add a link to the site from the app. But (a) the original author probably won't accept that, because F-Droid counts linking to non-free content as an anti-feature, and (b) that probably breaks the Google Play developer terms, because you're dodging the 30% fee on in-app purchases that way.

You might end up with two versions of the app: an open-source one, with the website link, and one for Google Play, with IAPs. Maintaining the two branches of the source might be a bit of a nuisance.

I'll probably build a secondary app that imports the modules to the Internal storage/Android/Data/com.original.app.thats.open.source folder, so users can buy the modules and use them in the main app. Then I'll add a link to the main app for the secondary app.

Do you see anything wrong with this logic, @DanHulme?

(That folder I referenced is where the main app places modules the user has downloaded)

@MattZabojnik yes, apps can't write to each other's data directories

@DanHulme But if I'm able to access the folder using a file manager app, why couldn't I do something similar? It's the data folder in Internal Storage, not the root data folder. I'm not trying to argue, I'm trying to understand. What am I missing here? Do you have a link to some docs that might be helpful?

@MattZabojnik you've requested to have your question "taken down". Do you mean "delete"?

It is already "put on hold" (i.e. noone can add answers to it). If you want to "remove" it altogether, you can do so for your own posts (questions as well as answers) using the "delete" link below the body post.

Good evening, gentlemen.