In-app purchases now available in free apps

When iPhone OS 3.0 was first released, Apple stated that only paid apps would be able to take advantage of in-app purchases. This allowed developers to offer, say, the first 10 levels of a game, then to charge a little extra for additional levels. Now, free applications will be able to offer upgrades via in-app purchases, which will hopefully clear the App Store of the hundreds of lite titles of which I am personally not a fan.

For developers, this will hopefully simplify things. Rather than having separate applications for full-featured and lite versions, developers could now concentrate on a single application, offering upgrades to more features through in-app purchases.

There are a few questions for current applications that may choose to migrate to using in-app purchases, especially if you’ve already bought the full-featured version. We’re still waiting on an answer from Apple on this one, as there are a few things that need to be altered in Apple’s App Store policies.

You can expect to see new applications using the new free/in-app purchases model hitting the App Store in the coming weeks. We’ll let you know when they begin to arrive.