We get about half a dozen emails a month from users who for whatever reason no longer have access to their old iTunes account and would like help finding / restoring their previous Pleco iOS purchases, and also usually 2 or 3 from people who've lost their iPhone, replaced it it with an Android phone and have no way of looking up their old iOS purchase in order to transfer it to Android. Since Apple anonymizes all purchases, we often have absolutely no way to help in these situations unless the user has had the foresight to write down their "Registration ID," which most people don't do.
For this reason, we've decided to introduce some kind of mechanism in the next version of Pleco for people to "register" their purchases, so that they have a reliable way to look them up even if they can no longer access the account they were made from and never wrote down their Registration ID. There are basically two ways we can do this:
One solution might be to provide both options, but we already solve WAY too many problems in Pleco that way
, so I wanted to know if anybody had any strong opinions on / justifications for picking one system over the other. On Android we do have access to paying customers' names / addresses / emails / etc (no way to avoid it, in fact - they're in our Google Checkout account whether we want them or not), but with Apple going to so much effort to preserve users' anonymity, and with all of the recent scandals on that front, perhaps we should err on the side of inconveniencing users rather than asking for personal information.
For this reason, we've decided to introduce some kind of mechanism in the next version of Pleco for people to "register" their purchases, so that they have a reliable way to look them up even if they can no longer access the account they were made from and never wrote down their Registration ID. There are basically two ways we can do this:
- User keeps data - we make it really easy to save your Registration ID: put up a dialog offering to automatically insert it into an email to yourself the first time you buy an add-on, e.g. This has the advantage of preserving user privacy, but of course it also puts the burden on users to keep that information around.
- Pleco keeps data - we prompt the user to supply an email address for a new purchase that we then associate with the Registration ID, so that if they run into any problems later we can look up their order by their email address. (this could also feed into an automated system for transferring purchases on Android e.g.) However, this means we get access to people's email addresses, which some people might prefer not to give us.
One solution might be to provide both options, but we already solve WAY too many problems in Pleco that way
, so I wanted to know if anybody had any strong opinions on / justifications for picking one system over the other. On Android we do have access to paying customers' names / addresses / emails / etc (no way to avoid it, in fact - they're in our Google Checkout account whether we want them or not), but with Apple going to so much effort to preserve users' anonymity, and with all of the recent scandals on that front, perhaps we should err on the side of inconveniencing users rather than asking for personal information.
