Say I am developing a game.
I want to offer two different subscription memberships.
$5 monthly, VIP Basic: Can get 100 gems per day.
$9 monthly, VIP Advanced: Can get 300 gems per day.
Can I set up two subscription memberships?
What if the user purchase VIP Basic for 3 days and want to upgrade to VIP Advanced, does he/she have an option to upgrade or he/she has to wait for the first subscription to expire?
Thanks,
You can have multiple subscription options and your users can change their subscription preferences whenever they'd like. Although there are many different tutorials on the internet some things are recommended by almost everyone:
First things first you'll need to verify the subscriptions of your users by sending a receipt data to Apple's iTunes servers. Do NOT do it on the phone or locally. Do it on a web server of your own, preferably having HTTPS certificate.
Remember to store a user's subscription either locally or on a web server since Apple Review documents requires your users to have the edit option available to them in your app.
Users should have the restore option available to them as well. So don't forget to add that to your subscription integration.
When displaying your subscription prices and details do it by fetching their info from Apple. Don't add static texts or prices since review team will reject your app because of this.
Subscription prices can be changed for each country from Appstore Connect panel. Remember to adjust the prices based on certain countries economic state.
You can't test real subscription options on development environment thus you'll need to use some sandbox environment parameters. Don't forget to remove them when you are sending an update.
Lastly here is a good tutorial with example codes on how to add auto-renewable subscriptions to an app.
Related
Our app was rejected in App Store because we were using 3rd party solution for subscription and was decided to use In-App Purchases ( Auto-Renewable Subscriptions). I went through several tutorials and it seems that the subscription has to be created in App Store Connect and only then it will be available to use in app and that's the problem for us.
Our app is something like news app where user can subscribe to some author. List of authors comes from server therefore hardcode every subscription for each author is not the way to go.
So, Is that possible to somehow implement what I want with In-App Purchases? Thanks.
There is no option to create subscription dynamically. Your case is a draw back of iOS subscription platform. I have pointed out this problem to Apple subscription team but they were not ready to accept this and forced us to implement in-app subscription, so we had to restrict the number of subscription in app.
Only possible option is to create a number of subscription groups, lets say 10 groups representing each author.
authorSusbcription1,authorSusbcription2,...authorSusbcription10
I know it's not a viable solution since the number of authors is indefinite. But we don't have any option as of now. You can restrict 10 authors subscription in the app and then prompt users to buy from website if it's exceeds 10.You can show some alert that doesn't violate the in-app rule. For example, "Further subscription is not available in this app" instead of mentioning about your website. Track this user and use an API to send an email to this user asking to subscribe via website.
Unless Apple fix this drawback, we have no other options..!
Dynamic Auto-Renewable Subscriptions creation (and dynamic in-app purchase creation in general) is not possible. Alternatives would be to sell credits to authors (but this is non-auto renewable). Another possibility is to sell tiers of subscriptions that grant access to a number of authors.
I'm currently building an iOS app which includes auto-renewing subscriptions via iTunes. I also provide a secondary subscription service via Stripe for web users, and a subscription on either platform enables premium features for all platforms.
A subscription is therefore tied to the user account in my backend database. I don't particularly care what device they are on.
One problem I am envisaging is that if a user creates a second account on my service, and presses restore purchase in the app, the subscription according to apple must be given. As far as I can tell, showing error such as "You're subscription is already active on another account" would not be allowed.
So I was wondering, instead of rejecting the subscription, can I instead transfer it? Something like this flow:
User creates an account aaa#foo.com
User pays for subscription on aaa#foo.com
User signs out and creates a second account zzz#foo.com
User presses "restore purchases"
Backend transfers the subscription from aaa#foo.com to zzz#foo.com.
User signs out of zzz#foo.com and back in to aaa#foo.com. The first account is no longer "premium", as the second one has the subscription.
Would this be an acceptable approach to take?
Well, in the Apple guideline is not clear enough to know if your option is good. But I think it would be a good option because like that you are allowing user to get their subscription on all of their device as if they use their good account
3.1.2(a) Permissible uses: If you offer an auto-renewing subscription, you must provide ongoing value to the customer, and the subscription period must last at least seven days and be available across all of the user’s devices. While the following list is not exhaustive, examples of appropriate subscriptions include: new game levels; episodic content; multi-player support; apps that offer consistent, substantive updates; access to large collections of, or continually updated, media content; software as a service (“SAAS”); and cloud support. In addition:
Subscriptions may be offered alongside a la carte offerings (e.g. you may offer a subscription to an entire library of films as well the purchase or rental of a single movie).
You may offer a single subscription that is shared across your own apps and services, but these subscriptions may not extend to third party apps or services. Games offered in a game subscription must be owned or exclusively licensed by the developer (e.g. not part of a game publishing platform). Each game must be downloaded directly from the App Store, must be designed to avoid duplicate payment by a subscriber, and should not disadvantage non-subscriber customers.
Subscriptions must work on all of the user’s devices where the app is available. Learn more about sharing a subscription across your apps.
Apps must not force users to rate the app, review the app, download other apps, or other similar actions in order to access functionality, content, or use of the app.
As with all apps, those offering subscriptions should allow a user to get what they’ve paid for without performing additional tasks, such as posting on social media, uploading contacts, checking in to the app a certain number of times, etc.
Subscriptions may include consumable credits, gems, in-game currencies, etc., and you may offer subscriptions that include access to discounted consumable goods (e.g. a platinum membership that exposes gem-packs for a reduced price).
If you are changing your existing app to a subscription-based business model, you should not take away the primary functionality existing users have already paid for. For example, let customers who have already purchased a “full game unlock” continue to access the full game after you introduce a subscription model for new customers.
Apple Review Guideline
I'm currently working on an iOS app that will allow users to purchase an auto-renew subscription to access service charged monthly. I would like to be able to offer a basic and premium service, and allow users to upgrade or downgrade from one or the other.
I've set up test users and some test products and I've found that if you select the basic subscription first and then later on select to purchase the premium subscription the test user is charged for both services simultaneously.
Does anyone know if its possible to programmatically cancel a users current subscription when we've noticed they've either upgraded or downgraded their service, so they are only being charged once?
I've seen that using this link
https://buy.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/manageSubscriptions
Allows a user to manage their subscriptions manually, but I would like to handle migrating them to their new plan automatically.
The control over the subscription once purchased is by the user. Only the user who purchased can cancel the renewal. As a developer you can't do any changes.
After a discussion with someone at Apple the answer to this is question is that there is no support for multiple product subscriptions with the same duration. They would not comment on how certain apps are able to do this. Officially it's not possible.
We are developing one iOS application for iPhone which will free features as well app will have premium features with 4 in app purchase auto-renewable subscription options as below:
Single monthly subscription
Single yearly subscription
Family monthly subscription
Family yearly subscription
We will have one store screen inside the application which will have options to subscribe to various subscriptions which our app provides.
We found that user can go to device settings and manage their In-app purchase subscriptions.
We are also planning to provide options like user can upgrade from one subscription to other and user should also be able to down grade their subscription which would be all of the same options in reverse and back to the free version
Possible upgrading option:
Free to Any 4 subscription options
Single monthly to single yearly
Single monthly to family monthly
Single monthly to family yearly
Family monthly to family yearly
Possible down grading options:
Family yearly to family monthly
Family yearly to single monthly
Family monthly to single monthly
Single yearly to single monthly
From any 4 subscription options to Free version
Note:
According to Apple we can not use Apple family sharing option to share In App purchases so we are developing our own family sharing option in application. (Reference: https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT203046)
Queries:
We have some doubts how we can manage the subscription in our iOS application?
How device settings options will show our 4 In App Purchase options for upgrading and degrading form one option to other?
What are the consideration we need to task care as an iOS developer for restoring the auto renewable subscription? we are not clear with the possible scenario if user try to restore using iTunes account with multiple user accounts in our app, what are the preventions we can take care which apple allows while user buy subscription one time and try to restore on multiple user account?
Apple will reject custom family sharing option using auto renewable subscription option?
What are the points we need to take care at our end which apple will not handle if we can go with above features?
What are the possibilities of violating the apple guidelines and app rejection if we are going with above features with iOS application?
It will be great help to us if any one can share their views or provide some guidance on which way we should go or if we are going off track from the apple policy.... all those kind of your feedback will help us to get things moving over here.
Thanks
We have some doubts how we can manage the subscription in our iOS application?
Because you are using your own user management system, you should persist the state of a subscription associated to the user in your database. When the user creates a purchase in the app, the app should send this receipt on to your API which will then proceed to validate it.
Once persisted, enqueue a scheduled process to run on the Subscription Expiration Date to update the record and ad infinitum until the expiration date is no longer in the future.
Your app should query your API when the user opens the app to determine their subscription status. Don't rely on the receipt locally in the app as your user's family member devices will not have this purchase associated.
How device settings options will show our 4 In App Purchase options for upgrading and degrading form one option to other?
If all products listed in iTunes Connect are of the same "Subscription Family", they will appear in the Subscription Management page in the users iTunes account.
When a user switches between products a transaction will be created and a SKPaymentTransactionStatePurchased event will be added to the SKPaymentQueue. This will be a new transaction with the same Original Transaction Identifier as the first purchase made with a product from the same Subscription Family with the Product Identifier reflecting the new product.
For this reason, you want to have your transaction observer in your app running in the background to receive any new transactions. When a new transaction is received you can either a) send the whole receipt to your API or b) inform your API that a new transaction has been received and re-validate the receipt that was persisted.
Going with (a) may become problematic as the receipts will become larger over time requiring more bandwidth from the user each time.
Going with (b) also has it's drawbacks because you can get into trouble with edge cases like the user switching iTunes accounts. A solution for this is to store the apps identifierForVendor with the receipt, and require the app to send the whole receipt if it does not match. Most of the time you will just be informing the API that a transaction has occurred, and on the few occasions that the identifier doesn't match it will send along a new receipt.
What are the consideration we need to task care as an iOS developer for restoring the auto renewable subscription? we are not clear with the possible scenario if user try to restore using iTunes account with multiple user accounts in our app, what are the preventions we can take care which apple allows while user buy subscription one time and try to restore on multiple user account?
When restoring, a new transaction with a new transaction ID will be created, the original transaction ID will be the same though. If you create a transactions table in your database, you can ensure a transaction and it's original transaction is only ever associated to a single user, thus preventing users restoring purchases on other devices with a different user and gaining access to the subscription.
A restored transaction will be pushed onto the queue with SKPaymentTransactionStateRestored and so when this happens simply I advise sending the receipt to your API and process the receipt normally; associating any new transactions to the original user.
Apple will reject custom family sharing option using auto renewable subscription option?
I doubt it, but I am not Apple so don't take my word for gospel. Spotify have a similar scheme called "Spotify Family" where a user can share their Spotify account with their family, not sure if this is enabled for their iTunes app though.
What are the points we need to take care at our end which apple will not handle if we can go with above features?
You need your own API with user management and family association
Your users need to sign-in/register on your app
You will need to prevent family users from purchasing if their parent account already has a purchase.
Persist receipts and the identifierForVendor in the database.
Handle receipt validations using the validation API.
Persist a table of transactions and consider this table self-referential so that a transaction can belong to an original transaction through the original_transaction_id. Ensure the transaction_id column is unique.
Validate the receipt each time a transaction is due for renewal.
What are the possibilities of violating the apple guidelines and app rejection if we are going with above features with iOS application?
I see nothing in the guidelines except for section 17.2:
Apps that require users to share personal information, such as email address and date of birth, in order to function will be rejected
I think this one is a little contradictory, since in 17.5 it states:
Apps that include account registration or access a user’s existing account must include a privacy policy or they will be rejected
I guess by this, it means a user must be able to use the app without requiring registration, but I know of many examples of apps that do exactly this.
I need to build an app for a system, which already has a subscription on its website. It looks like Apple doesn't allow to use any own subscriptions and forces to integrate any app with iOS in-app subscriptions.
Is it any way to integrate two subscription systems? The main problem is that users can manage iOS subscriptions via iTunes and I can't find whether it's possible to get information about this and to stop subscription in the existing system if it's stopped via iTunes.
So is it possible to get notifications about unsubscribed iTunes users?
Using third party subscriptions
First off, it is possible to support an existing subscription system in your app, but it must be in addition to the App Store subscriptions. Also you have to be very careful about the UI you use. You can't prompt users to bypass the App Store and purchase through your server, but you can offer existing subscribers the ability to sign in with credentials they may have previously obtained through your website.
That said, Apple can be fairly capricious in their rulings on what is and isn't allowed in the App Store. I have worked on apps that have done this sort of thing, but they have been for fairly well known magazine publications. There's no guarantee that they will allow it for everyone.
Detecting unsubscribed App Store subscriptions
As for using App Store subscriptions, when a user purchases a subscription in your app, they will receive a receipt in the SKPaymentTransaction object. This receipt should be posted to your backend server to make sure it is valid before you give the user access to anything. See the In-App Purchase Programming Guide for more details.
When you setup a subscription type, you specify how long that subscription lasts. So if you log the transaction date in the SKPaymentTransaction when you receive a receipt, you can determine exactly when that subscription should expire by adding the duration of the subscription to the transaction date.
If it's an auto-renewing subscription, you will receive a new receipt when the subscription is renewed. So once you have validated that with your backend server, you can update your expiry date based on the new transaction date. If you don't receive a new receipt before the first one expires, it's likely the user has cancelled their subscription.
On the backend, your server can also tell when a particular subscription will expire based on the response from the verification server. First there is the status code which will tell you whether the subscription has already expired, but there is also an expiry date returned in the decoded receipt which will tell you when it is expected to expire if it hasn't already.
For more details, see the Auto-Renewable Subscriptions documentation.
Testing auto-renewing subscriptions
It's worth noting that when you are testing auto-renewing subscriptions in the App Store sandbox environment, the length of the various subscription types is dramatically shortened to make it easier to test. For example a 1 week subscription lasts only 3 minutes in the sandbox environment. You can see the full list of times in the iTunes Connect Developer Guide.
So you want the people that have bought the service from the website to be able to use the app, exactly like if they had purchased it from in App Purchases and in App Purchases people to be able to join the service just like people that joined through the site? As far as I know, Apple doesn't allow you to pay through other services as you said, but let's say someone buys the service from the app. What should happen would be that the money will be transferred to the company. Then after the payment you should include some code doing what the site does after a new person has payed for the service, so create his account as a paid account. Then, the app should also have a login screen where the registered users (no matter where they registered from) will be able to login into the app and use the service. Now the problem is indeed that if the subscription is stopped through iTunes you would never know, though a way around this would be to make a check in the server of this company which should monitor the income coming from one account. Then if this user has stopped paying (or stopped the subscription) you would be able to stop the service from the app. And you should recheck the server for payment after the duration of the subscription has passed, let's say a weekly subscription should be checked every week. (Sorry I would do this a comment but I haven't got enough reputation for this)