I just tried to add "licensing" to my app.
I first found "lvl_library", which is supposed to offer license handling - so users can pay for an app. Now my app in reality isnt a "pay upfront". It is free + weekly subscription for extra features.
A very common scheme. I tried to add a "subscription" in the Google Play Console. But ... this page doesnt work. It shows what seems to be nonsense.
So it has nice pretentious text, but there is no way to do anything . The UI that would create/edit a subscription is fully missing. The extra link to "Learn more" leads to a text that applies only for users that had an "old" subscription, how to convert it to a new one. But there is 0 information on how to create/declare a subscription from scratch.
Looking further i found that there is the "Google Play Billing Library" which seems to be still actively supported by Google.
Now my simple question - is "Billing Library" the way to go ? Can i throw away "LVL Library" ? I am sure someone already did this successfully. It would be great to share the rough path.
Or - rethinking this - is this just bad bad Google UI ? When you see the image above - does this open a secret passage to a UI that would allow to create/define a subscription ? I might just be blinded, because i expected it here. You know , when i enter Mac Donalds i expect Burgers. And when i enter Starbucks i expect coffee. So when i press "subscription" i expect UI to work on subscriptions. But ... maybe i am expecting to much.
Just for the "technical" part - if the Play Console blocks a part of the UI - how does it know that it should block ? Is this (= using billing library/ using subscriptions) burned into the apk/application bundle/ androidmanifest ? There must be some mechanism that allows the UI-blocking. Either it is some obscure UI stuff that one has to do upfront in the Play Console. Or it is backed into the upload (manifest or apk).
If you happen to have a working solution that can get weekly subscriptions in Android that would be great. Even better would be a way that works with recent Google Apis.
My suspicion is that they silently dropped the Subscription part of LVL_library and are now in the middle of switching to Billing Library for subscriptions.
I will now dive into Integrate Play Billing into app
It is a bit suboptimal that one has to first code a full implementation just to determine what the real scope of an api is.