Overview
- Google Play announced a suite of subscription updates that add Usage-Based Billing, Multi-Quantity purchases, Mixed Carts, Cross-Developer Bundling, and new retention and payment-recovery tools.
- Usage-Based Billing is a prepaid metered model that lets users automatically top up balances so apps with variable compute costs, like generative AI services, can run without interruption.
- Multi-Quantity Subscription Purchase lets organizations buy multiple seats in one transaction and assign them to team members or students to simplify group licensing.
- Mixed Carts and Cross-Developer Bundling create a single checkout flow for auto-renewing subscriptions and one-time products and let developers sell hard bundles across apps as a single SKU.
- The In-App Messaging API is broadly available now while many other features are rolling out through an Early Access Program that developers can join via partner managers, and Play will run server-side payment retries and fraud protections to reduce involuntary churn.