Saving unlocks for users across devices?

I’ve been wondering about something and whether I should even consider doing it.

My first app will be going live very soon and will have unlocks that one uses through tapjoy offerwall/videos.

What I’m wondering is let’s say a user unlocks 5 features in my app. If they then lose their device and get a replacement those unlocks are gone and they have to unlock them again.

Obviously income wise it’s always nice to have to unlock them again, but I’ve been wondering if it might be worth building a feature for my users to keep those unlocks even if they switch devices.

Anyone got some feedback on this or suggestions?

I thought perhaps having an option to link the unlocks to their google account (I can code a database system from my website, that’s not an issue)

that would need some permissions which your users maybe don’t like nor understand why they should give your their google acc information.

It’s only offerwalls … I would live with it. If they lose their device they also lose all their game progress in many games as well …

I think tying it to their google account would be good. But I would make it an option so if the user doesn’t want to link their account then they don’t have to but run the risk of losing their unlocked items.

I’m thinking of doing something similar with my drinking game. Especially since users can spend real money to unlock items as well as use the tapjoy offerwall. I already had one person that had to get a replacement phone and asked about getting their items back… I just gave him a code to enter that gave him more than enough points to get back the stuff he unlocked. I figured better to give it to him to make a happy user than to not and create an upset user. Even though I had no way to verify if he actually did unlock the items.

So I’m looking into either an option to save a file out to the sdcard that can be imported on the new phone or the online backup link to google account or an email.

The sdcard option isn’t that great because many new phones have internal storage that the ‘Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory()’ points to even if they have a sdcard slot. And many others have no slot at all. So they need to back this file up somewhere else in case their phone is lost or damaged or manually copy it to new phone if its just an upgrade in phones. Plus you want to somehow make sure they aren’t making one backup and restoring it on multiple phones of friends.

The cloud backup option is ideal except for users not wanting to provide personal info. Plus if you tie to any email and not their google account of the phone then you need to make sure that a bunch of phones aren’t registered to same email.

***Update - looking around I saw this http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/backup.html to tie into the default google backup and restore. I might play around with it and see how easy it is to us and what all you can backup.

You NEED to make it optional … you cannot use their google account, they get a alert box open where the user has to accept that this app is using specific information (like mail) from your google account an d users have to confirm it … not quite sure if you need a special permission to be honest …

maybe you can use their android id? licensing uses this id … maybe you can too ?

I’ve decided for now to leave it out, especially since it’s free offers, not inapp billing.

But in the future I think I’ll integrate the option to backup the settings.

fiveHellions has also given me the idea for having the option to give users unlock codes, something I hadn’t considered. I plan on adding this relatively soon.

I was going to mention that API :slight_smile: It’s actually the recommended way to handle this scenario. There are very few apps which use it at present, but it would be great to see more freemium apps adopting this model.