I'm working on an iOS app that will use Apple's in-app purchasing framework to let the user create auto-renewing subscriptions.
I want my server to check periodically that none of the subscriptions have expired. Apple's Receipt Validation Programming Guide describes a verifyReceipt web service that appears to validate a single receipt.
However, if I want to bulk-verify my entire database every few days, is there a better way to do that than a storm of individual verifyReceipt calls?
You don't need to need to bulk-verify your entire database. A subscription is valid for a fixed duration. If the user cancels their subscription then this takes effect at the next renewal period, not immediately.
Apple customer service can refund a subscription if a user has a case (wrong product purchase is one example they give) but this would be a pretty low figure - and your app should also check for a valid subscription when it starts.
So you should only need to verify subscriptions that are known to be expiring "today".
To my knowledge there's no way to send multiple receipts in one bulk request to validate them in the iTunes servers... You have to send one by one. (Multiple requests)...
I don't know if how you are planing to solve this is the best approach. Apple has extended documentation on how to handle auto renewal subscriptions, most of the times you check the validity of the subscription in the app itself.
Check the in-app purchase documentation. It's a very good read if you plan to depend on in-app subscriptions for your business model:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/technotes/tn2259/_index.html
Related
I work for a game developing company which releases at least one game a month. For our true fans we want to start providing a subscription to our games, so they can play all our games (on any platform) without constantly having to buy them.
The idea for iOS is to use the in-app auto-renewable subscription. This results into a receipt which we store in our backend. The backend can validate this receipt and provide the apps with information about the subscription of the user.
This system will solve a lot of problems: You can take the subscription in 1 game, and play all the games as well, on any device you like.
But now we come to the problem: After a month the receipt is not valid anymore, and we need to check in the iTunes store to see if the user still has a valid subscription.
My first idea was to use the "latest_receipt_info" field, to get the latest receipt and validate this. But according the documentation this feature should only be used for iOS 6 receipts:
"Only returned for iOS 6 style transaction receipts for auto-renewable
subscriptions."
source:
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/General/ValidateAppStoreReceipt/Chapters/ValidateRemotely.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010573-
Even though I can actually still use this field with my brandnew iOS 10 receipt, I don't think it's smart to use it since it's deprecated.
(another source telling you shouldn't use it anymore: https://forums.developer.apple.com/message/156580#156580)
The advised solution of apple is to implement a SKPaymentTransactionObserver in the app. This will retrieve the latest receipt when it's available, and send this to the backend. Even though this is far from ideal, this could work... however:
This means the app has to be active to retrieve the latest receipt. And in our case it's very well possible a user takes a subscription in app1, and after a couple of days downloads app2, 3 and 4, but never uses app1 again. So in this case the latest receipt will never be fetched (because only the observer of app1 can access the receipt)
To fix this problem we should be able to fetch the receipts from this subscription from any app in our subscription group. But according the documentation on the apple site (https://developer.apple.com/app-store/subscriptions/ ) you can only access a subscription from 1 app, and you have to do the multiple app thing yourself:
You can offer auto-renewable
subscriptions to access multiple apps in your portfolio. Each app must
be approved to use auto-renewable in-app purchases and must be
published under the same developer name on the App Store.
In iTunes Connect, you’ll need to set up separate and equivalent
auto-renewable in-app purchases in each app offered in the multi-app
subscription so that users can subscribe from any app. To avoid users
paying multiple times for the same offering, you are responsible for
verifying that they are subscribers in one of the apps before showing
any subscription options. To do this, consider maintaining an account
management system in which users create an account with your business
to sign in to each app.
So is there any way to do what we want, without forcing the user to go back to the app he used to purchase the subscription every month?
On the last WWDC we went to StoreKit labs and personally asked StoreKit evangelist about this. We were told that the 'latest_receipt_info' field return by iTunes validateReceipt endpoint is exactly what we are suppose to use in order to check if the subscription was renewed or not.
This is not going to be deprecated in the near future but they do have plans for adding some server-to-server communication that solve few of the problems we ran into:
Your server will be able to get notification from Apple regarding any subscription renewal, cancellation, downgrades etc.
In the latest_receipt_info returned by the validateReceipt endpoint few fields will be added, providing information like whether the subscription will be renewed after current one is expired, whether there was a problem charging the user's credit card etc.
Sources:
WWDC 2017 Session 303 - What's new in StoreKit
WWDC 2017 Session 305 - Advanced StoreKit
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)
I'm trying to work out the best mechanism to handle the auto renewing part so that it handles the continuation of the subscription into the next period.
What the best way of handling this?
Should I have an NSTimer set to check if the current expires_date has been reached .. and then try send a purchase request?
Apple iOS in-app purchases provides the product "Auto-renewable subscription". This product will be renewed automatically by Apple.
When you use this type of product, your app has to verify if the auto-renewable subscription is still valid, since the user might have cancelled the subscription. When an user cancel a subscription, the subscription remains valid until the end of the subscription period.
To validate an auto-renewable subscription, you have to use the purchase receipt and the shared secret generated for your app in-app purchases in iTunes Connect. You have to post this two things to the App Store. This will return a JSON and you have to get from this data the "
subscription's latest purchase date". From that date you have to calculate the expiration date and validate or invalidate the subscription.
You can do all this validation after application launch and/or when the model is updated.
Additional information
You can find information about auto-renewable subscription in Apple documentation. Also, you can check about MKStoreKit, which is a framework that reduces the amount of code that you have to write for the use of StoreKit, and supports Auto-renewable subscriptions.
I am building an app that offers a 30-day subscription to premium services in the app.
I am familiar with in-app purchases (consumables) and have everything setup up for that. However, I haven't found any good tutorial or explanation of what the proper procedure for validating auto-renewable subscriptions.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
What I would like to do is have the subscription setup like this:
User purchases in-app subscription and is verified
Subscription End-Date (30 days from purchase) is added to network database with user's account info
How to detect when the subscription is renewed so I can update the network database
UPDATE
So I have figured out the original purchasing and receipt verification, so all good on that. Then getting expired date by getting the value of 'expires_date' from the receipt data.
What I need to accomplish now is the best way to check for ALL completed transactions on app load (including any auto-renewed subscriptions) so I can unlock premium services. Using 'restoreCompletedTransactions' allows me to receive old receipt data, but it forces the user to enter a password, and I would like to avoid this. What are the alternatives?
a user purchases a product and you save the receipt. keep track of a timestamp so you know how long the subscription is valid for. on each launch you validate the receipt. you will always get the latest receipt so you know whether the product was renewed. using the timestamp you can make sure the user doesnt get access after their subscription has cancelled.
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.