Tracking Android in-app subscription events with Firebase Analytics

Question

We're using Firebase Analytics to track our Android app. We've connected it to our Google Play account in hopes to receive the automatic in_app_purchase events. What we later realized is that does not support in-app subscriptions: https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317485?hl=en

How do we track subscription revenue events?
We thought about using the ecommerce_purchase event (https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317499?hl=en) so we could track the ARPU, ARPPU and LTV of our users.

The problem we are facing is dealing with subscription recurrence. Should we manually send this event each month/year and stop sending once the subscription is cancelled? It seems like a error-prone hack ...

Any other ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you want to pursue the technique you described, from your server, you can track whether a google subscription event is active or cancelled via the subscriptions API.

If you poll this API, you should be able to determine when to send the ecommerce_purchase event to firebase.

Here is a ruby example of polling the API for Google Play. You can poll the iTunes API with a similar technique.