AppCoins News Update, or ANU for short, is a regular bi-weekly update by the AppCoins team. As usual, we are going to cover dev updates, market reports, team members and upcoming events. This week’s focus is on the credit card payment feature, BDS Billing, and the AppCoins upcoming participation in 2018 DEMO ASIA Summit.

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The almighty Dev Update has come once again!

On the 2nd of September, we’ve released Ritchie, the biggest release of the AppCoins project so far. This release included a billing system developed by Blockchain Distribution Services (BDS), which enables developers to integrate a billing system that manages purchases, inventory, and payments for them. For developers that already had Google Play Billing integrated, the transition to BDS Billing became as smooth as possible.

In addition, Ritchie also included the possibility for users to pay for in-app items using credit cards. This is done using the AppCoins BDS Wallet. Not only is this a familiar pattern to users, but it also shatters one of the biggest friction points of adoption that is acquiring cryptocurrencies. For users to pay using APPC directly, they would need to buy ETH or BTC with fiat currency (a process that can take days), send the ETH or BTC to an exchange like Binance or Huobi, trade it for APPC, and finally, send the APPC to the wallet address they are using in the AppCoins BDS Wallet. With the possibility to pay using credit cards, users only need to have the AppCoins BDS Wallet installed and input their credit cards details. The purchase occurs in a matter of seconds, which is orders of magnitude better than the current latency of Ethereum transactions.

Lastly, both BDS Billing System and Credit Card Payments maintain the basic assumption of the AppCoins Protocol.

Developers should be able to validate the interactions between users and their apps without the need to trust any third party.

In the last week and a half, we’ve been solving minor issues in the credit card payment feature and in the BDS Billing itself. All of these issues are classified as minor because they don’t make users lose APPC or fiat currency while performing in-app payments. They are corner cases of the flows that would prevent users to pay for in-app items in the first place. For example, if a user tried to pay for an in-app item using a credit card and canceled the purchase before completing it, it would become impossible to purchase an in-app item again.

Some of these issues were fixed in yesterday’s minor release, which was pushed to Google Play and Aptoide.

In the next following weeks, we’ll be working on making the AppCoins BDS Wallet compatible with apps that integrate the App Store Foundation (ASF) SDK, and also remaking the User Acquisition flow. The former is important because at the moment the AppCoins BDS Wallet is tightly coupled with the BDS Billing system, in the sense that it only works correctly for in-app items in apps that have BDS Billing integrated. We want to make the AppCoins BDS Wallet compatible with ASF payments, which rely only on APPC payments and don’t need to have the app certified by any third party.

Regarding the User Acquisition flow — which is the flow where users can get rewarded with APPC for giving attention to apps, given a campaign for apps is created by their developers — it doesn’t work at the moment for users. This is due to the fact that users need ETH to submit the proofs-of-attention to the blockchain. We’ll remake the flow to enable users to get the rewards without the need to have ETH. More details regarding this will be included in the next ANU.

Following last month’s performance table with the KPIs of the protocol performance, on this ANU we have collected the values from August, regarding both flows using AppCoins, IAP and User Acquisition, the number of apps downloaded with the integration of AppCoins as well as indicators from the SDK, as the table shows below.

Stay tuned for news in the next few weeks. Great things will happen!