I am developing a magazine app which has autorenewable subscription.I have implemented the purchase method and doin the validation using the receipt.My doubt are
1 . How to know whether the subscription has expired or not from the receipt
2 . How to restore the purchases or downloaded contents to another device .Currently my own server is providing the contents to download.So If I purchased some magazines in January and February, then if I try to restore the purchase in another device in march,how could I restore the downloaded contents or check with my server to download the previously downloaded contents.The receipt contains only product ID and nothing related or unique to user , to handle users in server so that the downloads and restore can be handled from the server.
Thanks.Looking forward for expert help.
Each user's device can obtain a receipt and either hand that receipt to your server or decode it and hand the results to your server. Your server will then respond to that device by downloading whatever it is entitled to receive. The receipt contains all of the purchases made under that account and the dates the purchases were made so you should be able to figure out the active time of the subscription. You could also use the 'expires_date' if the question is only whether the subscription is currently active.
If a device needs to prove that its subscription is valid it first tells the user that it needs to check on its subscription and then it executes either a restoreCompletedTransactions or a SKReceiptRefreshRequest.
Related
I made In-App purchase for consumable product in my ios app. purchase flow completely working fine. but i have some few doubts in my point, so let any one clears my doubts its very useful for me to fine tune my app better
after purchasing i can get receipt data, can i send this receipt data to server
during purchase if user internet disconnect, how i can get purchase information like its succeed, or its failed. i need this kind of information to be stored in back-end server
like wise i need to store all purchases to my back-end server. like user a purchased this item with time & date. user b attempt to purchase this item but poor network purchase not succeed
if i store these data its useful for me to analyze in-app purchases happened inside my ios application.
its look like a dashboard to find all these information. hope any one will help me to solve this.
thanks
Yes, you can send the receipt date to the server and you should to it to verify receipt instead of verify on local.
You subscribe the changes on payment queue, and when the device reconnected to the internet, you'll receive the payment events. Additional, there're product types you have to provide UI for users to restore purchased products.
It depends on your product requirements, for me, only successfully purchased receipts are stored (around ~1gb per day)
When building In App Purchases into an iOS app, Apple gives you access to a receipt that you can send to your server to view all In App Purchase transactions for that given iTunes user related to your application.
If in my application I require users to login or create an account through my system before making a purchase, how can I guarantee that iTunes receipt will not be duplicated?
For example, if a user makes a purchase, the application sends the user ID, and iTunes receipt to my server. The server then stores that receipt along with the user ID in a database. The next time the server wants to check the users purchases we can retrieve all the receipts for that given user ID out of the database and run checks on it.
But if the user logs out and logs in as a different user and makes another purchase the receipt will be sent to the server again, with a different user ID. Effectively, allowing 1 purchase to be used on unlimited user accounts.
Due to the fact that the receipts change over time (auto renewing subscriptions, etc), I don't think it's safe to rely on the receipt being the same every time it's sent to my server and using the receipt data as a unique identifier.
I also considered storing the original_transaction_id for one of the transactions, but I don't think that would work since an application might have multiple non-consumable items, or multiple subscriptions, therefor there might be multiple completely valid original_transaction_id's in one receipt. So it doesn't really associate that receipt, but just the transaction.
Ideally, I'd like a system where when a user logs out, and logs in (as a different user or same), the application will send the receipt to the server, and dissociate any of the same receipts for all existing users, and link this new receipt to the user that logged in. Problem is, it doesn't look like there is any type of unique identifier for a given receipt that I can use to check for duplicate receipts in my system.
What is the best way to detect duplicate receipts sent to my server (so I can dissociate the old receipts accordingly)?
PS. I think this system is most important for subscriptions, and non-consumable items. For consumable items it will always have to be linked to 1 specific user, and I can just store the transaction_id and original_transaction_id for that consumable item to ensure it doesn't get duplicated.
I just run into a problem with in-app auto-renewable subscription. The app contains this kind of subscription and the app can be used by multiple users but the subscription is bind to the apple id is used on the device. So if a different user log in to the app than the system say he has a valid subscription. If I log the subscribed users on my backend server than if a user without subscription log into the app can not make a new subscription according to the Apple's response because the apple id used on the device. An other problem if a keep track of the subscriptions on my backend server if the user unsubscribe on the apple's webpage I can't notify the server about if.
What do I do wrong? What is the right workflow for this case?
I hope do you understand my dilemma.
Thanks!
Your use case is absolutely valid and that's exactly how the subscriptions In-App purchase work with any platform (Apple/Google).
In case of Subscriptions in-app purchase the content delivery is entirely the responsibility of the app provider and not the platform. You have no direct way of identifying if the app user has been switched to a different user as you can't access the current logged in user on iTunes account on the device.
You need to manage this use case on your own by keeping some data locally on the device and maintain user purchase history but still that wouldn't solve the purpose 100%. When user will go for purchase of the subscription it will show the service as already subscribed unless the iTunes user account is also switched on the device.
You can keep track of the unsubscribed state from the backend as when the subscription is successful you will get a receipt from iTunes which you can use to save in your DB. You need to run a backend job on the server side to validate the saved receipt to check the updated receipt which will give you details if the subscription has been expired or not.
It's my first integration of In-App Purchases. I have everything working: I can buy the item I want, also use restoreCompletedTransactions.
Every time I call restoreCompletedTransactions() I am asked for username and password.
Is this because I am in sandbox mode or will this happen once being live as well?
How do I check if the user has bought it before? (I know I can save it in the user settings, but it would be nice to check if it was bought by polling the Apple server without the user needing to enter username and password).
How do others handle this? Because surely you want to know if they refunded it.
Quote from the Apple Article Instructions on how "not" to do this:
Restoring purchases prompts for the user’s App Store credentials, which interrupts the flow of your app: because of this, don’t automatically restore purchases, especially not every time your app is launched.
The best way to do this would be use receipts.
Steps in general are:
1) Your app would usually request a payment upon first time use
2) Once the customer has paid (or subscribed), then
3) Your app should download the receipt from the AppStore, and then store a copy of the Private Key and certificate details onto your server (or Cloud if it's a non-renewable subscription)
4) Your server should verify that receipt with the AppStore.
5) Optional: Your server can then query-last-receipt to ensure that the user's subscription is always up to date.
6) Once your server is satisfied, then let the app know that content can now be unlocked etc.
In other words, use receipts to verify and not keep retrieving finished transactions otherwise it would put your customers off by keep asking them for the iTunes password every time they need to start your app.
For more information, please watch this apple video
I hope this helps
Regards
Heider
I am implementing a digital magazine project for a client. Auto-renewable subscriptions for a period of 3/6/12 months have been included as a feature. My question is while using in-app purchase, is there any way for the server to map the user?? Anyway to identify a particular user is using it? I have done extensive research and know that apple doesn't allow the user's apple-id to be mapped?? Is there any other way to identify a particular user?
The problem arises for subscription. If an user has undertaken a subscription for let's say 3 months, then my app has to show DOWNLOAD button for all the 3 months instead of the regular BUY button. But when a new magazine is launched on to the storefront, how would the app know that this person is subscribed or not and convert the BUY to DOWNLOAD?
When a user buys a subscription, you should store the receipt on your server. This receipt, in a way, becomes your way to identify the user's account. Whenever you want to check the status of an account, send that receipt to iTunes for verification and it'll respond with the latest receipt for that subscription, along with the expiration date. Since you've made a note of which specific device that receipt came from, you can provide the proper UI to that user.
Now, if the user installs your app on a new device they can tap a Restore button that you've provided in your app. That button will call restoreCompletedTransactions which will send all the Auto-Renewing receipts for that user's Apple ID to the device.