I’m at a point in app development where I have to decide how to publish a free ad version as well as a paid version with no ads and additional features. I’m using Unity, and since I’m fairly new to the Unity environment, I’m in the middle of figuring out a way to make a custom build pipeline so that I can share code, yet save two different configurations.
On one hand, it’s very clear to the user that there is a free and paid app, since they are different listings in the Play Store. But if I can’t figure out multiple project settings in Unity, I’ll have to manually change settings before publishing each version, which can be very error prone.
But on the other hand, it seems simpler to just support in-app purchases and allow users to simply unlock the free version right inside the game. The drawback to this method though, is that this requires the app to have the billing permission enabled, which some users aren’t always receptive to allowing.
I may go the route of doing the in-app unlock, and perhaps put up a paid version listing later on.