Rovio has introduced one of the first in-app Android payments for its wildly popular Angry Birds. The new in-app payment system is called “Bad Piggy Bank” and gives users the opportunity to purchase the “Mighty Eagle and other cool new content…” by clicking on the Bad Piggy Bank icon. Payments are then made by SMS and charged to a user’s next phone bill. Initially, the new functionality has been activated in Finland and then only on the Elisa mobile network for Android devices. However, according to Rovio’s blog the system will come to other carriers and countries in the future.
The news is significant as one of the biggest problems with the Android platform from a developer perspective has been the monetization of apps. “This is one of the bigger issues that all the developers have with Android,” said Rovio CEO Mikael Hed in an interview with Wired.com. “It doesn’t have iTunes.”
The system adopted by Rovio makes it much easier for both users to make purchases and for developers to make some money. The launch of the new Android Market web store should help address the problem to some extent. It allows users to buy apps direct from their desktop browser and then “push” the apps to their Android mobile devices.
