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Chargebee relies on the transaction information generated by Apple and Google stores to create a single source of truth for subscriptions across multiple marketplaces. You can pass the customer information collected in your app and the transaction information to Chargebee through APIs to create customers and record the in-app subscriptions in Chargebee.
Chargebee launched its in-app purchase solution as an Early Access Program (EAP) in 2022. Building on insights from the EAP, an upgraded version was released in October 2024. In this document, the initial solution is referred to as Mobile Subscriptions - Legacy, and the upgraded version is referred to as Omnichannel Subscriptions.
In the new solution, in-app subscriptions/purchases from different online marketplaces will be represented as omnichannel subscriptions/purchases. The respective marketplace will fully control the subscription state management for the omnichannel subscriptions in Chargebee, and hence, Chargebee's billing engine will not manage these subscriptions. Chargebee will solely rely on the server notifications from these app stores to manage the subscription state without generating any invoices.
Currently, only Apple App Store subscriptions are supported in the new solution. The same omni-channel representation will be extended to Google Play Store and Chargebee web subscriptions as well in 2025. Learn more about the new solution.
This solution was built on the premise that in-app subscriptions of app stores can be represented as Chargebee's subscription. This means that the billing engine of Chargebee can renew the subscriptions, generate invoices in the payment due state, and mark the invoices as paid upon receiving notification from the respective stores. We observed that notifications from the app stores don't arrive on time and thus retrofitting app store subscriptions to Chargebee leads to subscription state mismatches. This, in turn, leads to incorrect provisioning. We also observed that subscription states of regular web subscriptions, item prices, and invoice entities are not fully suitable to represent the purchases made on these online app marketplaces. This led to many limitations. Hence we decided to decouple the in-app subscriptions from regular Chargebee subscriptions and launched the new version of the solution.
We've stopped giving access to the legacy solution unless it's critical to the business needs and there's a requirement for managing Play Store subscriptions. Learn more about the legacy solution.
Integrate your Apple and Google apps with Chargebee by accessing mobile app stores in the marketplace.
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