Google Play Billing for OTT app

Google requires every sellable item to exist as a product in Play Console: a subscription with base plans and renewal periods for each plan you sell, and a one-time product for each pay-per-view title. Prices are set there per country. The Flicknexs admin does not create Play products; it maps to the identifiers you created so the app knows which product sells which plan or title.

Each pay-per-view title in the admin carries a field for the Google product identifier that sells it, and subscription products correspond to the plans you defined. When the Android app builds its plan and title screens it reads those mappings and queries Play Billing for the matching products, so the viewer sees Google's local price beside the plan or title they are about to buy.

The viewer taps buy and Google's purchase sheet appears, authenticated with the viewer's Google account. Google charges the viewer, applies the store's published fee, and returns a purchase with a purchase token to the app. The app never handles a card, and neither does the platform. The app sends the token and the product identifier to the platform for verification.

The platform presents the purchase token to Google from the server, using the service account credentials configured for your app, and reads Google's answer about the purchase state. Only when Google confirms the purchase does the platform record it against the signed-in viewer, mark the plan active or the title purchased, and open the content. A token Google does not recognize records nothing.

Google publishes a notification to a message-queue topic whenever a subscription changes. The platform subscribes to that topic, receives each message on the server, decodes the notification, and handles the subscription renewed, canceled and expired types. A renewal keeps the plan active; a cancellation or expiry updates the subscriber record so access ends when Google says the subscription is over.

Transaction history, refunds, the viewer's payment method and the authoritative subscription state live with Google and are visible in Play Console. The platform holds the verified purchase record, the current state as told by notifications, and the access it grants. The admin shows the plan or title on the subscriber record and the monthly reports show store-billed income next to web income.

The platform decodes every notification it receives, but the subscription types it acts on are renewed, canceled and expired. Other subscription events Google can send, such as a grace period or an account hold, are visible in Play Console and are not acted on by the platform in the current build. An operator who needs those states to change access should raise it before launch.

The viewer sees Google's price for the product in their country. Changing a plan price in the Flicknexs admin changes only the web price. Introductory pricing, free-trial offers and promotional codes on Play are configured and applied by Google inside Play Console; the platform records the product Google confirms and does not manage Play offers from the admin.

The promotion codes and the global coupon setting on the coupons and discounts page work only on Stripe checkout on the web. There is no code field on Google's purchase sheet and the platform cannot discount a Play price. A discount for Android buyers is a Play offer created in Play Console under Google's rules.

Real-time developer notifications only arrive if the topic exists, Google Play has permission to publish to it, and the topic name is entered in Play Console. If any of those is missing, purchases still verify by token, but renewals, cancellations and expiries will not reach the platform. Send the test notification from Play Console after any change to the Google Cloud project.

Whether an app on Google Play must use Google Play's billing system, what alternative billing programs exist in particular regions, and how those change over time are decided by the Google Play Developer Program Policies and Google's payments policy. Flicknexs implements the purchase and verification; it does not decide policy for your app. Read Google's policy for your markets before relying on a web-only sales model in the app.