Android In-App Payments Begin With Angry Birds

Angry Birds, the insanely popular multi-platform game, is introducing a new payment system to some Android customers for purchasing in-game content.

Angry Birds game players will be able to use their real cash money to pay for virtual goods existing only within the game’s ecosystem. It’s like buying a shovel for your plot on Farmville with your Mastercard.

The title? “Bad Piggy Bank.”

Yes, it has a stupid name. And yes, it’s only for Android/Angry Birds customers on the Elisa mobile carrier network in Finland. But it’s more significant than you might think.

Now, users won’t have to whip out the plastic every time they want to buy that shovel. Instead of typing in your 16-digit number when you want to purchase an item, you select content you want to purchase in the game, and select the Bad Piggy Bank icon (above), according to Rovio’s blog post. The charges are made via your phone’s SMS text messaging system, and the cost will appear in your phone bill.

The introduction of in-app payments are a step towards solving a big problem in dealing with virtual economies — how to get players to pay real dollars for non-real items. With in-app payments, developers reduce what is called the “friction” within app ecosystem purchases. That is, it’s much easier to fork over your cash when all it takes is a single click. And developer studios like Rovio want to make it as easy as possible on its customer base.

Until as recently as last Wednesday, Android users were bound to certain payment methods like Google Checkout, a service with a history plagued by user complaints. Direct carrier billing — which bills your mobile service provider for the app purchases you make — has been available since 2009, but only to T-Mobile customers using Android devices. A second carrier, AT&T, was added as recently as December.

Needless to say, payment options for Android OS devices have moved sluggishly forward over the past two years.

“This is one of the bigger issues that all the developers have with Android,” said Rovio CEO Mikael Hed in a previous interview with Wired.com. “It doesn’t have iTunes.”

Like Hed says, Apple hasn’t faced the payment issues in the same way. Each and every customer accessing the iOS App store is required to have an iTunes account, which is linked to an existing credit card account. With the Android Market, not all users even have Google Checkout.

That type of non-straightforward payment system seems to have led to a culture of freeloading on Google’s ecosystem.

“Nobody pays on Android,” says Rovio’s Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka.

Google wants to change that. Last week’s rollout of the Android Market web store brought users the chance to download apps from their desktop browser and “push” the apps to their Android mobile devices, easing the browse-ability of Android’s app catalog while hopefully increasing app sales.

Trying to lure in more Android app developers as well, app vendors are now able to specify the cost of each app in multiple currency amounts, saving users the time they spent doing the math on currency conversion themselves.

As mentioned before, Angry Birds is only allowing in-app payments for those on the Elisa mobile carrier network in Finland, but Google expects in-app payments to be available to all Android users before the end of spring. With that sort of time frame and the biggest app across all platforms already featuring the method of payment, we’ll have to wait and see if Android users start to pony up more dough.

Brian X. Chen contributed to this report.

Photo: Bad Piggy Bank/Rovio

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