Mobile deployment: remove in-app purchase and other extra features (DEF-3493)

Questions
#1

Hi,

we are distributing our first Defold app through the Play Store.
I released the apk as an alpha internal distribution, and the PlayStore listing is showing “Uses in-app purchase” under the “Install button”.
We do not implement IAP in our app, so having this tag could discourage some users to download it.

How do we disable in-app purchases completely? Our game.settings file only shows 2 options:

  • Google Play
  • Amazon

We also removed all the extra unused features from the AndroidManifest, such as advertising, GCM and the likes.
In doing so the game crashes at launch on Android devices, for it requires:

<meta-data android:name="com.google.android.gms.version" android:value="@integer/google_play_services_version" />

Which means that the DefoldActivity is using PlayServices to do something, right?

We do not need GCM, Ads, IAP etc…
How can we deactivate extra functionalities in a clean way?

Moreover, where can we find what frameworks are used under the hood to comply with the various regulations?

Thanks in advance!

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#2

Removing IAP and other extensions is definitely on our radar, we just have to schedule these things in a good way. It’s in our roadmap (See the category “Modularization”).

Apart from the IAP stuff, remaining use of the PlayServices, I believe it’s used for sys.get_sys_info() (ad_ident and ad_tracking_enabled), and if we can perhaps detect that we don’t have that specific manifest key, we can skip invoking that part as well. I’ve created ticket DEF-3493 for this.

We have no ETA for these particular tasks though.

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