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EnTerr's avatar
EnTerr
Roku Guru
9 years ago

What's "consumable" in Roku world?

I am struggling to understand clearly what the difference between "consumable" and "non-consumable" in-app product is in the world of Roku. TFM has only this precious little line: "A consumable product can be purchased by a customer more than once. A non-consumable product can only be purchased once"

Now, generally when one talks about "consumables", it means product that gets used / exhausted. Maybe the name is a misnomer. Say i buy 2 orchids from TraderJoes - does that make them "consumable"? Clarification: i don't plan eating the orchids, say my room needs two... never mind, they are perishable - but say instead i buy 2 picture frames from Michael's ... are these "consumable"?

In other worlds (say iOS), consumables are countable AND treated differently than one-time purchases, in that when another device B requests list of purchases, it does not receive the consumable ones (i.e. purchase already went to device A, it was "consumed"). Not so on Roku, getPurchases() returns everything. In fact it seems to be aggregating/totaling purchases by code (i.e. SELECT code, ..., sum(qty) FROM ... WHERE ... GROUP BY code).

I am not saying Roku's behavior is wrong or undesirable per se - i am trying to understand what does Roku mean by "consumable"?
Would perhaps a better wording been "quantitative" (countable) for "consumable" and "qualitative" (yes/no) for "non-consumable"?
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4 Replies

  • RokuJoel's avatar
    RokuJoel
    Binge Watcher
    9 years ago
    The idea, if I recall correctly, is that a consumable is intended for things like video Games for example you might need to buy coins you can use at the local space station to outfit your ship with better lasers, or a movie rental where you might rent the same thing again.

    A non consumable would be like a movie purchase for your library that never expires, or enabling the mega-laser permanently in a platformer.

    - Joel
  • EnTerr's avatar
    EnTerr
    Roku Guru
    9 years ago
    "RokuJoel" wrote:
    The idea, if I recall correctly, is that a consumable is intended for things like video Games for example you might need to buy coins you can use at the local space station to outfit your ship with better lasers, or a movie rental where you might rent the same thing again.

    Right... but will it give me any way to "consume" the amount over time? I.e. use RokuCo server side as a "coin purse" to deduct from the purchased credits over time? The fact that there is "quantity" when creating the product and also that getPurchases() returns running total seems to imply as if attempt at something like that (otherwise why does it do these if not usable?)

    A non consumable would be like a movie purchase for your library that never expires, or enabling the mega-laser permanently in a platformer.

    This seems clearer. But here is experiment i did - created non-consumable product (let's say code="Dogma_Movie", price $0.99) and then i did 
    store.setOrder([{code: "Dogma_Movie", qty:3}])
    store.doOrder()
    evt = port.WaitMessage(0)
    log(evt.getResponse())

    And lo and behold - dialog told me i'll be charged $2.97 and when i hit Purchase, it returned success and the event response showed qty=3. Shouldn't it have either failed the order for specifying qty<>1 - or auto-adjusted that to 1? Does not seem to have objections to purchasing >1. Or did i just discover a bug
  • EnTerr's avatar
    EnTerr
    Roku Guru
    9 years ago
    Bump on this one.
    Couple of questions remain unanswered above. ^

    (i am actually rummaging through the forum trying to find out where was the discussion on 1 in-app purchase associated with 2 apps and saw this)