Consumable digital purchases? It sounds funny to me in a way – afterall, how can software or a digital file be consumed? Though the use of enforced, artificial scarcity, that’s how! In truth, most of us consume digital bits every day – each time you use a debit or credit card you are spending dollars that don’t really exist anywhere other than as a string of bits in a few computers. Electronic currency is really just an agreement that we all have to allow these little bits to represent real world value. (and paper currency is really just the same thing)

I bring this up because I was recently perusing the Apple iPhone Developer documentation for in-app purchases. One of the things I had not realized until that point is that certain types of in-app purchases can be marked as “consumable.” The examples used are things like poker chips, credits, tokens etc. Essentially, this means that you can base an application’s functionality on pay-per-use or pay-per-feature model. For anyone offering a service-oriented application in the app-store, this should be a no-brainer. All sorts of service-related applications could become free or near-free and depend upon the user keeping their credits topped off in order to continue to use the app. In particular, this could be a boon to any app who’s back-end may incur a per-transaction fee, intensive computation or storage resources, or even proprietary data access. I’m hoping to see this model used more (though I hope not to see it abused) as more sophisticated service-related apps hit the store.