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I'm integrating Google App Invites Api into my Android game. Now I'm asking myself if it is allowed to reward the sender (person who invites friends) for each friend he sends an invitation to? Let's say I give the sender 100 ingame currency for each friends? I couldn't find anything related in the docs. Maybe you were lucky?Thank you!

sjkm
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  • I guess that's completely up to you. You don't need to ask Google about it. It's none of their concern. – Codo Feb 01 '16 at 12:21
  • Hi. First of all, thanks for your reply. However, I do think that it is also of their concern since it would generate much more traffic/Api calls? – sjkm Feb 01 '16 at 14:20
  • The traffic of app invites compared to the traffic of Google Analytics will probably be 1 : 1,000,000 once it's fully established (and is probably 1 : 1,000,000,000,000 today). So it is and always will be negligible for Google. But then, I'm not Google and can only guess... – Codo Feb 01 '16 at 14:26
  • And after all: Google wants to drive app installations. So they will be happy about more traffic as it's the very purpose of app invites. – Codo Feb 01 '16 at 14:27
  • Yeah, that could be true. However maybe they just want to prevent people from spamming around using their services? I don't want to risk that my app gets taken down because of something like this. Would be very sad. Would be great if we found an official statement. – sjkm Feb 01 '16 at 14:28

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You can include sender data in the deep link that's available in the receiving app installed from the invitation. The developer can then use this sender data and implement a reward or any other feature they would like. However, there isn't any "return channel" that automates messaging back to the sender.

Jim Cunningham
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  • First of all, thank you Jim for your answer! Exactly, Google also said in the official announcement that this deep link can be used to give the receiver a "present"/reward for installing the app. Now I was thinking about encouraging my app users to use the App Invites by giving them a small reward for each invitation they send. This could lead to a lot more invitations and thus to more installs. But is that allowed or could it be a reason that my app gets banned? – sjkm Feb 02 '16 at 23:13
  • How you reward your senders is up to you, and you as the developer will know how many invitations have been sent based on the invitation ids returned in onActivityResult() returned after starting the invitation activity. However, as you suspected there are spam controls so you should formulate the sender reward such that they only send out legitimate invites that have a possibility of acceptance and which should be a reasonable number for your app and number of personal contacts. – Jim Cunningham Feb 12 '16 at 18:45
  • Thank you very much for your detailed answer! However, I'm still a bit unsure what "legitimate" and "a reasonable number" exactly means. Would you say rewarding the sender only once per friend is legitimate? - I was thinking about giving the sender in-game currency for each friend he/she invites. Then I would store the ids (returned in onActivityResult()) to not give him a reward for the same friends again? – sjkm Feb 20 '16 at 18:00
  • Rewarding the sender is done using a channel outside of appinvites, so you can do whatever you'd like, but be careful how you structure that incentive. You don't want too great a positive feedback loop that will result in senders flooding the channel with invites simply to get rewards, from perhaps artificial receivers. That would likely trigger some controls. Perhaps you limit each sender to a small number of rewards per day, for example. A legitimate invite would avoid this type of situation. I hope that helps. – Jim Cunningham Feb 23 '16 at 03:14
  • Thank you Jim for getting back to me - really appreciate it! This is great information. Limiting each sender to a number of rewards per day sounds like a good idea! I'll implement it this way. I just wished there was more info straight to the point and more concrete (with some numbers maybe) in the docs. Have a nice day. – sjkm Feb 24 '16 at 13:12