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← All Blog entriesAccepting money sounds like the kind of feature where I should build a large billing system. For most small applications, I really do not want to. A payment provider can already handle the difficult parts: card processing, checkout, receipts, taxes in some setups, subscription management and a lot of the security requirements I would rather not implement myself.
Subscriptions are one of those features that are difficult to trust until you have tested the entire lifecycle on a real device. A paywall appearing correctly is not enough. I want to know what happens after a purchase, whether premium access appears, whether it survives an app restart, whether a previous purchase can be restored and what happens when the subscription state changes.
When I first thought about adding subscriptions to an app, I imagined the visible part: show a paywall, let the user choose a plan and unlock the premium features after payment. That is only the front of the system. The more important question is what happens afterwards.