The first open-source mobile payment library for Android

Following the trends of the world market and from the big love for small green robots, we decided to write our library for mobile payments in software for the Android platform.

If you want to find out what distinguishes our development from other similar ones, please read further. Under the cut, Android application developers are waiting for a contest with cash prizes, and application developers for other platforms will be able to earn money.


So, applications for mobile platforms are a hot trend in the IT industry. Not all developers manage to monetize their product by simply selling it. This is especially difficult for novice developers who do not yet have experience in promoting their products. Not less popular trend is the Freemium model of monetization, when a user gets a certain version of a program or product for free and only pays for some additional services. Thus, in-app payments appear for programs, that is, intra-program payments that allow developers to accept payments not immediately, but gradually, as the user becomes interested in the product. As practice has shown, this approach often brings far more effective results than the sale of the program itself.
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Internal payments provided by platform vendors have only two drawbacks. First, they take 30% of the amount paid by the user; secondly, their audience is limited to users who are holders of credit / debit cards attached to the account. One of these problems is solved by mobile payments, in particular SMS payments, one of the providers of which is our company. SMS payments - the most affordable and easy way to pay in the world. The current audience available to our partners is more than 3 billion people, which no other payment system can boast. Moreover, this payment method is also very simple, because the user just needs to send an SMS to make a payment. And in this case, the person does not need to do this either, since the program generates and sends it on his own, but more on that later.

In the Russian-speaking market, our library has become the first, but for the sake of justice it is worth noting that we are not the first developers of such solutions. According to the primary assessment, our Western colleagues have 5 similar programs. The only and important difference of our solution is that it is absolutely free and open source under the new BSD license. We see no reason to provide partners with a closed binary version, depriving them of the ability to customize to the style of their application, and generally putting any restrictions.


Let us turn to the technical part. The user interface is simple, but contains all the necessary information required by the operators. The program receives this information from our server and if the Internet is not available, you can “stitch” the file at the compilation of the program; It will serve as a fallback option in cases where it is impossible to auto-update the tariff scale.

Data for the country and the operator, we are trying to get from the information stitched in the SIM-card, but just in case the user also has the option to select their country and operator.

There are two payment options:
- Fixed - when the developer specifies the desired amount, and the system automatically selects the desired rate.
- Multitariff - when the user is given the opportunity to choose the amount of payment. This option is more suitable for recharge; the developer only needs to specify the ratio of the domestic virtual currency, as well as the currency itself (gold, tugriks, gammi-berries).


After the user presses the “pay” button, the library compiles an SMS text based on the data of the selected tariff and tries to send it. She also scans incoming messages for a response, which she recognizes by a specific flag. The length of the SMS text is limited, but there is a possibility of sending additional information in the message (for example, the player's identifier) ​​and returning no less useful information in the reply SMS, already from the server. This solves the problem of payment validation for devices in which the Internet is not available.

In principle, the library was created to simplify the process of developing and integrating mobile payments, and contains a set of functions that solve all the technical problems described above. Despite the fact that the library code is open, in 95% of cases there is no sense in changing it and you can use it “out of the box”. Get more information and download the library on our website . The archive contains the library itself, a sample demo program, a sample code for the SMS handler on the server, and documentation.

We summarize the possibilities of the library:
- open source
- free of charge (in fact, this applies to all our services)
- fast integration, allowing you to start accepting payments after just a couple of hours
- The ability to receive payments from more than 3 billion people in the world from 92 countries
- translation into several languages ​​(over time their number will increase)
- uniqueness (try to find developers offering a similar solution under similar conditions)

By the way, we will be grateful for any ideas for improving the library.

And now about the competition promised at the very beginning of the article.
We are announcing a contest for Android developers: the first 10 developers who integrate our library into their application will receive an additional bonus to the first payment in our system.
* 1 place and a bonus of $ 1000 will receive one participant
* 2 place and $ 400 bonus will be shared by 2 members
* 3 place and a bonus of $ 100 will share 7 participants
Bonuses will be added only if the payout amount exceeds the bonus amount. Suppose 4 participants registered with a salary of 2000, 1500, 1300 and 500 dollars respectively. The first place will be received by the one who registered earlier, the other two will share the second place among themselves and the fourth will receive a bonus for the third place. To receive the bonus, you must provide the account name via the LAN or at sdk@smscoin.com after registering and integrating the library.

We do not ignore the developers and other platforms. Since we are accustomed to thinking and working globally, we consider the prospect of developing a similar library for other mobile platforms. So if you are a developer for Bada, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, J2ME platforms and are interested in porting our library to one of them, write to LAN or sdk@smscoin.com - we'll talk.