We built an analytics system for our messaging using the IAP receipts Apple provides us and one use case for us is to be able to segment users with expired subscription.
While doing that we have discovered that some users have expiration_date in the past (usually only couple of hours ago) and auto_renew_status is "1" (true) but the is_in_billing_retry_period is "0". I couldn't find what this state means, does anyone have an idea of how to interpret this state?
The documentation says Apple is trying to bill the user 24hours prior the expiration date an if there's a billing error the user should get into is_in_billing_retry_period = "1".
is_in_billing_retry_period: "0" is an indicator for an expired subscription that Apple has stopped attempting to renew the subscription.
You should see an expiration_intent: 2 as well indicating the subscription expired due to a billing error.
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I have implemented apple auto renewal subscription in my app but have not get any expiry notification from webhook. Can someone please help me?
At the WWDC21, they announced a new Server-To-Server Notification (S2S) called EXPIRED (https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10174/?time=1030). This S2S will have different substates to know the expiration's cause: VOLUNTARY, BILLING_RETRY and PRICE_INCREASE.
With current S2S, you have different S2S, that won't cover all the cases:
CANCEL: Indicates that either Apple customer support canceled the subscription or the user upgraded their subscription. The cancellation_date key contains the date and time of the change.
DID_FAIL_TO_RENEW: Indicates a subscription that failed to renew due to a billing issue. Be cautious, when a grace period is defined, it doesn't always mean the subscription has expired (more info here)
REFUND: Indicates that App Store successfully refunded a transaction.
REVOKE: Indicates that an in-app purchase the user was entitled to through Family Sharing is no longer available through sharing. StoreKit sends this notification when a purchaser disabled Family Sharing for a product, the purchaser (or family member) left the family group, or the purchaser asked for and received a refund.
That's why, to ensure you revoke the access of a subscriber when the subscription expires, you have to re-check the subscription's validity with /verifyReceipt. S2S won't be enough until the new S2S arrive. And even then, you should always check manually since you could miss a S2S because of errors on your side or on Apple side.
I've written a full article on the subject that should help you fully understand this difficult subject: How to detect an expired subscription on the different app stores.
Good day,
Can someone please tell me how can I know track an event in my code/server when someone cancels a auto-renewable subscription from itunes/appleid
Thankyou
To check when someone cancels a renewable subscription, you need to periodically refresh the receipt on your server and check the:
Expiration Date (lets you know if subscription is still active)
Auto-renew status (lets you know if the user "cancelled")
Cancellation Date (tells you why subscription cancelled by support)
Usually developers get 2 and 3 confused. Apple doesn't consider a user opting out of auto-renew a "cancellation" - when in fact that's what most developers would consider a cancellation. For this reason, it's NOT sufficient to listen for CANCEL events with the subscription status notifications.
Here's a good blog post that goes over the details: iOS Subscriptions are Hard
I am facing issues with my auto-renewing subscription for an iOS app that offers auto-renewable subscription.
The Subscription Status URL is at times, not being called when the subscription is renewed. This is making it difficult for us to track the user's subscription status. Funnily, this behaviour is completely arbitrary at times it is called and everything works smoothly, but at times it is not called at all.
Also, once the user's subscription is renewed, at times the user is not charged on his/her credit card instantly. Is this behaviour normal?
You have to follow basic rules for subscription based application.
Whenever you buy any auto renew subscription, in success verify your receipt and verify expiry date.
On every application launch very receipt and verify subscription. On depending result you can notify your server.
In sandbox environment for monthly subscription it will auto renew for every 5 mins. It will auto renew for 5 times. So you can check your test cases. After that it will be expire.
In real world case subscription will auto renew before 24 hours of renew date. So if user cancels subscription before that.
If you are using SwiftyStorekit than it will be very much easy for you to handle each and every steps. Let me know you if you want more coding approach in this case.I will share example code details if you want.
The Subscription Notifications are pretty unreliable and the descriptions of how they work aren't very clear. For example:
RENEWAL events aren’t sent when a subscription renews. ... RENEWAL
is sent when a subscription has expired, then later, the user starts
the subscription again.
CANCEL does not mean a user normally cancelled their subscription. It only is sent when a user cancels their subscription via customer
support. This is also known colloquially as a refund.
Source: RevenueCat (Disclaimer: I work there)
I've been reading the various threads on in-app purchases auto-renewal subscriptions, and I think I've pieced together most of the information I need, but there are a few missing pieces. I'm hoping someone can help me.
The situation:
I have various subscription packages the user can subscribe to (e.g., package A for £1 a month, package B for £2 a month, etc.). I store the user's subscription information in my database. When the user logs in, I check which package he's on and if it's expired or not. My website, android and iOS all use the same database, hence this approach seems to make sense.
Subscribing users via in-app purchase seems straight forward enough. I check paymentQueue and once the payment is cleared, I can update my database.
My questions:
1) My understanding is the user can use iTunes to manage their subscription. Say, they go in to iTunes and cancel their subscription, how can I be notified so I can update my database? Do I need a daemon that checks expired subscriptions to see if the user renewed?
2) If the user wants to upgrade their subscription from Package A to Package B, how do I handle the pricing? Say on Jan 1st, they buy Package A, I charge them £1.00 and set the expiry date to Jan. 31st. On Jan. 15th, they want to upgrade to package B via in-app purchase. Ideally, I would charge them £2 for Package B minus £0.50 of credit they have for Package A and set the new expiry date to feb 14th. However, Apple forces me to associate each package with a tier price. How can I handle this? I don't want the user to wait until the end of the month to put them on a higher tier package...if they upgraded mid-month, it means they want the new content package B will deliver to them immediately.
Any help appreciated!
Thanks!
1) Yes you'll have to reverify your receipt check out the Receipt Validation Programming Guide in the documentation. They mention some important keys:
status - 0 if receipt is valid, or an error code
receipt - JSON response of the receipt
latest_receipt (auto-renewable only) - base 64 encoded receipt for the most recent renewal
latest_receipt_info - JSON version of latest_receipt
With this information, when a purchase is made, send the receipt to your backend for validation, the backend will keep the receipt in the DB and verify with status = 0 that it's a valid receipt. From there, every x days you can validate that receipt with a chron job, daemon, etc. and reverify. The response back each time will have latest_receipt_info that you now need to save to your DB so you have an up-to-date receipt for the next check in x days. This way you will always have the latest receipt. There is no instant notification for telling when a user cancels a subscription, but with this you'll know every x days if they have the subscription still.
2) Pricing like this unfortunately can't be handled. It was not intended for a user to "upgrade" with subscriptions - each subscription is access to it's own exclusive content as of this writing. However, if a customer emails in and complains about it, you could ask for their user name and figure out in your DB if this user has indeed upgraded mid-month and reimburse them appropriately. Very old-school and not feasible for a big user base, but hopefully you won't have that many and can keep them happy.
EDITED
For the second question, Apple's auto-renewable subscription system does not technically offer upgradeable plans between different products.
Every subscription is a stand alone product and it's up to the user to turn on/off subscriptions manually using the Subscription Manager in the iTunes Store.
However if package A and package B offer the exact same content only different duration than what ajay_nasa said is correct, you can create an single auto-subscription product with different duration options. If the user is on 1 month subscription and then the user tries to change to 2-months subscription they will get the following error message asking them go to the App Store's subscriptions manager
So basically the ONLY place the user can actually change the subscription's length is in the App Store. Whether Apple decide to pro-rate the amount left on the old subscription or just append it to the current one is really up to Apple. You need to make sure the user have access to the subscription as long as it's active by reading the Original Purchase Date and Subscription Expiration Date field from each receipt entry and determining the start and end dates of the subscription.
Answering question 1, you can verify subscription receipts in the same way as other IAP, but you'll need to check it periodically to see if the subscription has expired (the verification will tell you if it's expired).
There is more info on the Apple docs here:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StoreKitGuide/RenewableSubscriptions/RenewableSubscriptions.html
Actually, Apple's auto-renewable subscription system does offer upgradeable plans.
To achieve this we simply should add duration in existing Auto-Renewable Subscription. Every Auto-Renewable Subscription could be family of Subscriptions so whenever developer wants to achieve upgradation in subscription he should add duration in existing Auto-Renewable Subscription with different productID.
Whenever, user upgrade his plan in between the month then his upgrade plan will be automatically works from next month.
Answering to your question #1
Recently Apple launched a feature to enable server notification whenever the subscription is renewed. However, the subscription should be in-app.
See the links given below for your reference:
https://help.apple.com/itunes-connect/developer/#/dev0067a330b
&
https://itunespartner.apple.com/en/apps/news/45333106?sc_cid=ITC-AP-ENREC
We Need to Check Cancellation-Date provided in Receipt.
I am looking to build a ios application that will use an auto-renewable subscription on a monthly biases. We will be using some VOIP features that we will be charged monthly for. My question is, how can we be notified when a user cancels a subscription in IOS, so that we can cancel the users VOIP telephone number with our provider.
You will need to verify the receipt the same way you do for regular In App Purchases, but obviously you will do this every time the subscription period expires. Check out the documentation on this, Verifying an Auto-renewable Subscription Receipt
So based on this, it appears you will need to setup your server to check for a valid subscription every month (cron job?). This will allow you to cancel the VOIP number in your system if the subscription is no longer valid. Your app would be responsible for verifying a subscription is still valid when it is opened or the user attempts to access features that require a subscription.
Updated For Comment
The sandbox is supposed to return expiration dates in the following scheme.
This is from page 164 of the iTunes Connect Developer Guide
If it is not working this way you may want to file a bug report.
Also, please not the following from Apples IAP doc:
Additionally, a sandbox subscription will only autorenew a maximum of 6 times. After the subscription has auto-renewed 6 times, it will no longer renew in the sandbox.