here's my straightforward question:
is it allowed for my iOS application to force users to log into my custom account management system, so I can link them to my backend when they want to purchase a non-renewing subscription?
Here's the backstory:
I have a non-renewing subscription. For a good amount of users I can see that the Apple receipt does not contain information about this subscription; the in_app array is empty. This is correct according to the API:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StoreKitGuide/Chapters/Products.html
The in-app purchase receipt for a consumable product or non-renewing subscription is added to the receipt when the purchase is made. It is kept in the receipt until your app finishes that transaction. After that point, it is removed from the receipt the next time the receipt is updated—for example, when the user makes another purchase or if your app explicitly refreshes the receipt
For some users, I can still see the purchase in the receipt, but let's consider that a bug from Apple and follow their API documentation to the letter.
(More on why this is a bug here https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/22345)
In order to restore the user's purchase, I'd need something to identify him with. I could create a unique token, store that on the iCloud keychain and use that across the devices to detect the purchase belongs to that Apple account, but since my application supports account creation, I'd rather just use that mechanism. Else I'm using two different methods of purchase detection side by side: iCloud keychain token or a user account.
Thing is, I'm not sure I am allowed to force users to make an account before making a purchase. Is this something Apple would reject the app submission for with a message like "Your users must be able to buy stuff without going through your lengthy account registration process" ?
From Apple :
Non-renewable subscriptions. Subscriptions that don’t involve
delivering episodic content. Examples include access to a database of
historic photos or a collection of flight maps. It’s your app’s
responsibility to make the subscription available on all of the user’s
devices and to let users restore the purchase. This product type is
often used when your users already have an account on your server that
you can use to identify them when restoring content. Expiration and
the duration of the subscription are also left to your app (or your
server) to implement and enforce.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StoreKitGuide/Chapters/Products.html
So its your app's responsibility to check that user has valid subscription or its over and let them purchase it again !
For this you will ask user to first make account or login into app so by this way you can track their subscriptions.
Related
Here is a strange one for you :)
I have an iOS app that has a non-consumable product as a in-app purchase that the users could buy. It's kind of a lifetime subscription if you'd like.
The thing is that i had a bug in my code which allowed users to "subscribe" to my app by tapping on Restore Purchases button.
I fixed the bug now but i have a problem. Roughly 50 users are now subscribed but never payed for this service.
Is there a way to see if the user actually payed for this somehow? I would like to unsubscribe them if they did not pay.
The system works this way:
The user taps on Purchase, Apple takes care of the purchase for me and when processing the payment queue, if the purchase was a success i subscribe the user by adding their iCloud ID to my database. So the only piece of data that i have is their iCloud id and nothing else. I don't know which iCloud ID is a "payed" one and which is "cheating" :)
You can obtain the receipt from the user's device and check with Apple's endpoint to see if the user has a valid purchase. Ideally you should take the receipt from the app and send it to your server to perform the verification in your backend.
Check this documentation to obtain receipt from the device - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/in-app_purchase/validating_receipts_with_the_app_store
Check this documentation to call verify the receipt with Apple's endpoint - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appstorereceipts/verifyreceipt
I am implementing In-App Purchases first time in my application and new to In-app purchases Store Kit.
I have few doubts regarding In-app purchases:
What happens if a user purchased a subscription and logged out from the application and another user logs in and trying to purchase the same?
Does iTunes allow the second user to use the First user's purchased product?
If it allows how can we handle the second user's subscription?
What details we will get post Successful/Failed transactions from itunes to save in my database?
For a non-renewing subscription then it is entirely up to you to track expiration and determine what content a user has access to and when.
For example, say your subscription gave access to "the word of the day". If the subscription was active for the month of January, then the user would receive access to new words each day in January. The user should continue to be able to see January's words even after the subscription expires, but no new words.
If they resubscribe in March then they would now get new words throughout March.
You need to track all of this on your server against the user account.
Non-renewable subscription IAPs act much like consumable IAPs. The "Restore purchases" Store Kit function does not restore non-renewable IAP items.
To answer your specific questions:
If a new user logs in to your account system in the app (but the same iTunes account is still active on the device) then a second purchase will succeed and you need to update the subscription start and end dates for the new active account on your server.
You also need to cater for the following:
- The original account logs back in; In this case the original subscription entitlements need to be available
- The original or second account log in to another device; Again, the accounts subscription entitlements need to be available.
No, since non-renewing subscriptions are not restorable, the second user cannot "use" the first user's subscription.
You handle each account in your system independently.
Information about the mechanics of the purchase process are described in the In App Purchase Programming Guide
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.
My app got rejected because of restore button on non-renewing in app purchase. Do i have to remove restore button ? If i have to do so then how user will restore his purchases.Please help.
Non-renewing subscriptions are consumable. Therefore they cannot be restored. A restore button therefore makes no sense. You also need some kind of authentication/login system for the user. (See below for detailed explanations.)
Sources:
consumable vs. non-consumable in app purchases
non-renewing subscriptions
Update from WWDC2017: In Session #303 App Store Engineer Pete Hare explains at 3:00 that a non-renewing-subscription can be seen as "a consumable product with an expiry date on it"
There has been some debates in the comments wether non-renewing subscriptions are consumable or not, so I want to say something about it. "Consumable" means that you can consume them multiple times. Like "30 minutes of talking" in a voice-over-IP telephony application. On the other hand, there are non-consumables that you can buy only once. Like when you unlock all levels in a game app. You buy it once, and when you reset the device and redownload the app, you should be able to restore the purchase, so that you don't have to pay twice to unlock all levels. Furthermore, if you don't tap the restore-button in this case but just buy the "unlock all levels" package again, it works, but you will not be charged by apple a second time. That's why it is called non-consumable. It's some kind of metapher. An apple is "consumable". Once it is consumed, it is gone. A chair is non-consumable. You have it as long as you don't destroy it or give it away.
So, it makes sense to regard a non-renewing subscription as non-consumable. If you buy it a second time, you shouldn't pay twice, you should just use the old subscription you already have. If you reset the device, you should be able to restore the subscription once you re-download the app. The restoration is just not done by Apple but by the app itself.
I still regard non-renewing subscriptions as consumable though. I use a simple definition of consumable vs. non-consumable: An in-app-purchase is consumable, when, from the point of view of the StoreKit API, it can be purchased multiple times in the same week by the same user. All consumable IAP-items cannot be restored through the StoreKit. All non-consumable IAP-items can be restored through the StoreKit.
So, the developer is himself responsible for restoring the in-app-purchase of a non-renewing subscription, right? No, sorry. How would the app restore the in-app-purchase of a non-renewing subscription? Suppose I have an iPod and I subscribe to 1 month of listening to the Foo-radio. Now I want to also listen to the Foo-Radio on my iPad. Soo, I install the Foo-App on my iPad and tap the "restore" button. Well... what is the "restore" button supposed to do? How can it know if I already have purchased a "Foo"-subscription or not, and how long it will still be valid? Answer: it can not. This approach does not work.
In order for a non-renewing subscription to work, you have to login the user first, to tie the subscription to some online account. Username/Password, Open-ID, Login via Gmail, Facebook, etc. all would work. Then, when the user purchases an n-r subscription you have to store the fact that he subscribed on some server and link it to his account on the server. You also have to prevent the user from buying the n-r subscription when he is not already logged in. Let's continue with my iPod/iPad-example above. I download the app on my iPad, I login with Facebook, and voila, I can use the "Foo"-subscription now. There is no need for a "restore" button, because the app should check at login-time which subscriptions the user has.
There will be some additional problems to deal with. (1) For example, nothing prevents the user from logging in into 200 devices. Here the problem is not a user with 200 devices, but a university with 1000 students where 180 students share the same account. (2) If the server crashes, some people will probably lose their subscriptions. Problem (1) can potentially lead to decreased income. Problem (2) can lead to angry and unhappy customers.
From Apple: "Non-renewable subscriptions. Subscriptions that don’t involve delivering episodic content. Examples include access to a database of historic photos or a collection of flight maps. It’s your app’s responsibility to make the subscription available on all of the user’s devices and to let users restore the purchase. This product type is often used when your users already have an account on your server that you can use to identify them when restoring content. Expiration and the duration of the subscription are also left to your app (or your server) to implement and enforce." [Italics and bold added] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StoreKitGuide/Chapters/Products.html
Apple Reviewer's current-similar response about Non-Renewing Subscriptions "Your app offers Non-Renewing Subscriptions and this purchasability type must have its own restoring function - if you have removed it please re-implement it. Furthermore, your app must also offer a function, such as account creation, such that purchases can be tracked across all of a user's devices. Please implement a login feature as well as a restore mechanism prior to resubmitting your revised binary for review."
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)