MpesaBuddy
M-Pesa Mobile(Android) Example for GeeksTalkThursday session on 23rd,January 2020
Introduction
Payment Processing is an integral part on developing modern apps. This repo shows how to intergrate M-Pesa Payments on your mobile app.
At Apps:Lab we usually prefer payment processing to be on an API and not the mobile app itself. This means our Android Developers do not have to manually integrate the M-Pesa Payment API's or even interact with the safaricom portal itself
Why this approach
- Secure payments- With another layer, which is the API, there is another layer of security which comes with the API, as all API are token based and there is additional security measures on API. Integrating it manually on your mobile app code comes with additional duties as you have to ensure security on your own.
- Central place for all payments that is for all clients, be it web
- No double effort by mobile and web teams to integrate payments as payment integration is central
- Easy to intergrate in all mobile apps
What is Retrofit?
For those new to Android, we use Retrofit to consume API's and M-Pesa case is no different.
There is no extra magic here, just the way you can consume other API's in Android is the same way you will consume the M-Pesa API.
Retrofit is a library for handling REST API calls on Android. Retrofit automatically serialises the JSON response using a POJO(Plain Old Java Object) which must be defined in advanced for the JSON Structure.
Other Approaches
- Using M-Pesa SDK - Sample Project
- Lipa Na Mpesa Online - Sample Project