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Installing Store Kit in Titanium Studio

Notwithstanding I’m a full-stack Web developer and despite I don’t develop for mobile, I was asked to upgrade a legacy iPhone app so that it worked with the latest version of Titanium SDK on iOS. I was scared! But I have to admit that I was surprised to be able to do it.

One of the challenges I had to face was to convert the existing paid app into a “Freemium” one, so that the user is free to try, but can pay for something more. The concept is to provide the full content to paying users, and a preview to people that want only to try it. To do this, I needed to interface with the InAppPurchase (IAP) stuff on ITunes.

And here it comes the Store Kit module (ti.storekit). It is a very interesting extension, that allows interfacing with your iTunes account and that can manage purchases etc., but I had a very big challenge: I wasn’t able to install it!

Well, someone would say, it’s a simple thing, dude! Probably it is, if you are an iOS/Android developer. The reality is that the documentation I found was confused and contradictory, and it took two days to make it work on my MacBook. Somewhere I was suggesting to install Store Kit manually, and somewhere else I found different approaches that didn’t work.

But here you get the best (and quick!) solution I found, that is, leave gitTio to do the dirty job!

What is gitTio?

In few words, gitTio is a cool piece of software. It is basically a search engine for Titanium modules that runs from terminal. You install it using NPM, the package manager for Node.js:

[sudo] npm install -g gittio

Installing Store Kit

Once you’ve installed gitTio, if your tiapp.xml already references some modules, you can simply go to your project folder and run from terminal:

~/myproject $ gittio install -g

This will install all the modules referenced.

Or you can simply install the Store Kit module:

~/myproject $ gittio install ti.storekit

Et voilà, Store Kit now will be working in your app!

Reference

Install Store Kit with gitTio: http://gitt.io/component/ti.storekit

Published Nov 18, 2014

Senior Full Stack Developer