I am beginning looking into adding in-app purchasing to my iPad app (Objective-C, not swift) with the files being hosted by Apple, but I don't see anything that says it can do what I want it to do.
I do not see how to specify a customer-viewable thumbnail, just the ones for apple staff to see for review.
My app is a graphics program, and the in-app purchases are clipart, so the user will need to be able to see the thumbnail to know if they want to buy it. I am not including the files in the app bundle, because that would be huge, and I plan on constantly adding more clipart.
At this point the only thing I can think of is putting thumbnails on a web server and fetching ones that match a particular product ID, but I would think/hope that there is a simpler solution.
(also, if anyone can point me to a nice newish tutorial that is better than the Apple documentation, that would help too!)
EDIT:
Do I get some kind of award for asking a question nobody can seem to answer?
A free iPad maybe? Huh huh? :)
Unfortunately, Apple doesn't provide metadata for hosted downloads beyond what is available for non-hosted content. I'm afraid that you'll need to host your thumbnails on a server under your own control (keying it to the product identifier).
On the plus side, it's probably easier and quicker to update thumbnails on your own server than dealing with iTunes Connect!
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I am building out a iOS & Android app. My app may not fully scale to support users and have some limited functionality out the gates. I wanted to put an invite list on the front of registration like Mailbox did a few years ago.
I was trying to read the Apple app store guidelines to creating a "waiting list / invite list" and couldn't get a clear picture. I assume Android is more flexible on this, so I figured I could start with Apple's guidelines first.
Here is what I can find.
In Apple's docs, it says under 3.2.2 "UnAcceptable"
(v) Arbitrarily restricting who may use the app, such as by location or carrier.
In this specific case, I am not blocking by location or carrier. I am just putting up a wall to use the app since some of my users can use it in a limited form, but I can't open it up to everyone on Day 1.
I understand I can run a "testflight" release, but I wanted to make our app available in the App Store for anyone to download since it will be publicly available, just not fully ready for a million people to hit it. My understanding is that the testflight release requires a bit more work based on their docs and isn't as simple as just putting it in the public app store so anyone can get to it.
Apple has the ultimate authority for approving and rejecting apps in their app store so nothing on SO can really be perfect advice. If you are really concerned about approval, you can try to contact apple developers support. Here are a few things I would advise:
Make sure in the developer notes for Apple when you submit to them you include a free account.
In the notes for the app store let the users know that it may take up to __ hours for their registration to get activated.
My understanding is you are doing this to handle the volume of users as you are launching the app. Be advised though that if you start restricting users too much you will possibly get poor reviews. Only restrict usage if absolutely required. If you run into issues make sure you are communicating with the users so they understand.
Good luck with you new app!
I was hoping someone could help me understand this. I'm having an iPhone app sticker developed at the moment. This app is going to have different categories (angry, happy etc. There will be some free images but also some in app purchase for other cool ones.
I wanted to know what are the different ways of doing this. For example, I plan to have more than 25 different sets of stickers for purchase. I'm not too sure how it all works! Do I host all those pages at the Appstore or do I use a dedicated image hosting provider like Amazon or ...Sorry for the question is my first app and I'm not sure how it all works!
Thanks
Alex
You'll need to provide your own server for any online content.
Optionally you can include the content inside the app, and only allow access via IAP.
There's no provision for the content being hosted by Apple.
I was looking other big companies gallery on appstore on my iPhone. some of them have their logo on top with custom background color. I was wondering how, is it in the settings somewhere ? or we need to approach Apple and pay this.
See below :
These applications or developers are selected by Apple to be featured on their main page. This isn't a setting that you can control, or even something that you can pay for. The only way to get featured is if Apple thinks that your app is feature-worthy.
That being said, here's an article on how to get your app featured on the App Store: http://realmacsoftware.com/blog/how-to-get-featured-on-the-app-store
Here's another one that you might want to take a look at: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/10/29/get-featured-app-store/
The customized artwork has been provided by developers who were editorially selected by Apple and there is no other way to have your page customised. Even having hundreds of apps on the App Store was not enough, hovewer Apple suggests being prepared for the opportunity and having your assets ready.
All the technical details about assets, dimensions and types of files may be found in the document called "App Store Design Specifications" which you can find in iTunes Connect.
This is interesting. I never seen this thing before and any settings in iTC to customise this page.
As you said, this must be something specific and for big companies only. There is a contract or something like that that allows them to customise their own page.
To be completely sure, contact the Apple Developers Team or ask in the Developer Forums. Maybe some Apple guy will confirm this.
We have a paid app on the App Store with id following the lines of com.company.client and we want to add a free version, optimally with the id of com.company.client.free. I need to figure out how, if a user buys the paid app after using the free one, they can get their data from the free version into the paid one... I recall reading somewhere this was possible but I can't for the life of me find it in the apple documentation. I vaguely remember it had to do with the app's bundle ID and using a wild card, but since we already have a version on the app store that we can't change, I don't know how that would affect it. Any help or links to proper documentation would be greatly appreciated.
You can share keychain data between applications in the same family. I would however only recommend this for small user data such as passwords, username etc.
See this guide on how to do that:
http://useyourloaf.com/blog/2010/04/03/keychain-group-access.html
For heavier data, I recommend that you use an online service with user accounts to share the data between your apps. (as mentioned by Clafou, iCloud might help you here for iOS5 and above)
A third option for you could be to make the paid version free, and then use add in-app-purchase for the paid content. But maybe that could cause problems like how to handle the users that have already paid for your app.
I have a similar requirement and am yet to try this out, but if you are happy to use iCloud then you could use the same iCloud identifier (which is different to your Bundle IDs) in both versions of your app so that the data could be sync'ed across devices and across your app versions (paid and free).
We have two Apps live on the Appstore. One for free, and one full featured version which is offered to buy. The free app has a In-App-Store so the user may update to the full featured version.
Actually I am thinking about stoping development of the full featured App (which is identical
to the free one at code level). We don't want to blame our customers. It would be nice to give them a redemption code for the free app to unlock all features. All features which will be unlocked this way are bound to the redemption code. All customers who did In-App purchases are "registered" by Apple, so the purchase will be remembered for all devices. Finally all In-App customers would have an advantage over the Pro-Version customers, which is not acceptable for us.
Is it possible to have one (hidden) free In-App purchase, which the user could "buy" if the redemption code is working? Maybe a better question is: What is the best practice for putting two similar Apps together without bugging the customers?
Not possible, I'm afraid. There is no good solution as far as I am aware (I still have a paid and a "lite" version for this reason).
You could raise a bug report with Apple (http://bugreporter.apple.com) but there's no saying if of when they'll ever make a change.
How about this idea:
Add a URL scheme to your lite app which, when invoked, enables the full featured version.
In your next update for the paid app add a button to "Enable all features in the lite version" that invokes that URL scheme (UIApplication's openURL:). This will open the lite app which will then enable all features.
One problem: if somebody else figures out what that URL scheme is, he could write a simple little app that just uses that URL scheme to enable the features in your lite app. Which means that person could get all the features without ever buying your paid app.
To prevent this I would implement this URL scheme in such a way that it only works when called with a secret parameter, maybe the hash of the device's MAC address and a salt. (Not sure if this is the best way, but that would be my first idea)