I would like to build a mechanism to free my in-app purchases for some of my VIP users devices. My idea is I pre-save the UDID of the user devices in my backend server. When the app starts, it will call my server and get the list of udid and check if the device is in VIP list. if yes, directly show full features without any button to ask for in-app purchase.
However, UDID cannot be used anymore. What should I do in this case? I dont want to ask user to enter some codes. because it would disturb my user interface.
new updates of the question:
The purpose is that , I got a list of people that they will review my apps , but i dont want to have any pop up to ask for promo code or any specific UI for these people. So my idea is I ask them to give me their UDID (or whatever number that they can identify themselves for their phone), and I save them in my backend. When they download the app, the app call the backend and compare their identifier number/UDID, see if they are my VIP, and give them full features automatically without asking promo code and any UI specific for these user.
I would like to identify the user only. Do you guys have any solutions?
thanks
You could do something like provide a URL to the users which opens the app and gives the app some parameter(s). When the app receives these details it could show an alert to ask for a name or some other info (like an e-mail address) from the user. Then you can send the details to your server for verification and set some value in the app to enable the features. In this way the UI of the app is not changed.
I think it's not conform with the iOS/App Store TOS (to be clear).
The easy way is to use the UDID but we can't now... You can get another unique "number" for identifying the device like the Mac Address (you can get in in Objective-C, not really simple but you can).
You can add a button which asks for a promo code (maybe the same button to buy the in-app upgrade). Only those who have a promo code can get the upgrade for free.
Also, should it be "VIP users" rather than "VIP user devices"?
Related
My app is a catalog of ebook-like content. Some of which are free to read, and some other are paid. I need to ask for user email / password to be able to retain the information of which content was successfuly completed, or until which chapter it was completed so the user can have his information synced accross all platforms.
However I got this rejection message :
Apps cannot require user registration prior to allowing access to app
content and features that are not associated specifically to the user.
Next Steps
User registration that requires the sharing of personal information
must be optional or tied to account-specific functionality.
To resolve this issue, please make it clear to the user that
registering will enable them to access the content from any of their
iOS devices and provide them a way to register at any time, if they
wish to later extend access to additional iOS devices.
Please note that although guideline 3.1.2 of the App Store Review
Guidelines requires an app to make subscription content available to
all the iOS devices owned by a single user, it is not appropriate to
force user registration to meet this requirement; such user
registration must be made optional.
Please resolve 5.1.1 issue and resubmit your revised binary to iTunes
Connect.
I am very surprised as I know apps such as Feedly which do not allow you to subscribe to RSS feed unless you create an account.
How should I get this problem solved ?
I have faced the similar rejection. As per the guide lines app is not supposed to force registration. So I ended up adding a skip button on the registration page. You need to add some content that users can view without registration. For example a user can preview a FREE book (maybe first page only) but can't read the full book without registration.
You can keep asking user for registration later when user is browsing the content.
There are some apps with forced registration and are available in AppStore like WhatsApp. But you need very strong arguments to convince Apple review team to consider and it's only possible if your app is really can't work without registration. In your case I don't think that's true.
For registration and login, your app must Serve contents/data user wise. e.g. Specific user settings, profile or follow topics etc. If your app does such things then Apple wont have any problems for your login or registration.
This is because of some apps have Registrations just to collect the email addresses of users.
If i will add "Guide" screen, then this issue will be resolved or not!
I want to let users of my iPhone app invite people from their contacts to a group they're creating. I can use deeplinks for people that already have the app installed to have an invitation automatically show up, but I was wondering if I can somehow pass custom information to someone downloading the app for the first time so after they initially open the app they'll have an invite waiting.
As far as I can tell this is impossible but I was wondering if there's any other way to somehow associate a contact with that person making an account on their own device. My application uses gmail authentication for account creation so if everybody had each other's gmails saved in their contact this might be possible, but that's not the case unfortunately. If I could get a user's phone number then it would be easy but I know that's not allowed without specifically asking the user.
Does anybody know if it's possible to do something like deeplinking for people installing the app for the first time?
You can do this with Google Firebase Dynamic Links. Google has a guide for this here:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/
If I understand the question correctly, here is what I'd do:
Scenario: Send Invite
If the email invited by a user is a registered email, done.
If the email invited by user is not a registered email, store it in a separate table (pending invites)
Scenario: Sign up/ Sign in
User registers using email, store user information.
When the user logs in, check if email exists in pending invites table, if exists, present invitation.
Delete user from pending invites table
Not sure if you have it already but you might need a db table to keep the invitations sent by your users.
What you're describing is called Deferred Deep Linking (Deep Linking refers to using a link to open your app directly to a specific piece of content, and Deferred means that it works even if the app isn't installed first).
As you noted, there's no native way to accomplish this on either iOS or Android. URL schemes don't work, because they always fail with an error if the app isn't installed. Apple's newer Universal Links in iOS 9+ get closer in that they at least don't trigger an error if the app isn't installed, but you'd still have to handle redirecting the user from your website to the App Store. You can't pass context through to the app after install with Universal Links, so you wouldn't be able to present the invitation. Additionally. Universal Links actually aren't supported in a lot of places.
To make this work, you need a remote server to close the loop. You can build this yourself, but you really shouldn't for a lot of reasons (not the least of which being you have more important things to do). Free services like Branch.io (full disclosure: Branch is so awesome I work there) and Firebase Dynamic Links are designed to solve exactly this requirement, and can handle all of the backend infrastructure for deferred deep linking so you don't have to. From your perspective, as the developer, you'll seamlessly get exactly the same data to work with whether or not the app was installed when the link was clicked.
Is there a way to offer a purchase free of charge for in-app purchases? I'd like to give a free download as a promotional item and not charge the normal price that is listed in iTunes.
You have to code for this in your app. In my app all purchases are registered on parse.com and sync'd between user's devices. I can add a purchase to the class on parse.com for a user and then they get the IAP for free when the data sync's to their device.
Apple don't have any mechanism for this like they do with app purchases unfortunately. The best way I've found is a custom URL scheme, so you can generated a code/string of your custom URL type ://myApp/123456promoCodeFooBar12999 etc, then your app, in response can connect to your server and check this code off against your database (confirming that it has not been used before, and can't be used again on a diff device) before unlocking the feature. This circumvents needing to get UUID's off people etc (which you can't do in code anymore to check against anyway), you just need an email address, send link, user clicks in it, your app opens and away you go :)
edit addition 28 Feb 2014..
an alternate approach might be to submit an separate paid version of the application in which all upgrades are unlocked because they are paid for upfront at purchase time. You may choose to keep this off the iTunes shelf but occasionally put it up, perhaps at a prohibitively high price, $1000 etc, because you can get the normal promo codes off Apple for this one to give to journalists etc, just explain what you are doing to them in your cover letter and I'm sure they'll be more than happy to play ball
I want to create a social networking ios app which costs money, and when the user buys it they are allowed to create only one account on the app. So the purchase is associated with the account somehow... or the app has a specific id on each device its bought on... would I need to use gamecenter somehow...
How would I approach something like this?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
First of all, more than one person may use the device (think a family with an iPad) so what your doing is inherently a bad idea.
That said, you can use an in-app purchase to let them buy account access - check with the server first to make sure a desired username is available, then let them use an in-app purchase to buy access, and on your server tie that purchase ID to the user name. Even if they deleted the app and tried to re-purchase (while logged into the same iTunes store account) it would see a purchase had been made and essentially be the same user. It even does kind of work with multiple users as they could switch iTunes accounts (though that is a pain).
I would also suggest trying to tie it to the users iCloud account in some way, which is easier for users to switch between on an device (a family might use one iTunes account but have separate iCloud accounts).
If you don't want to give Apple 30% of the registration fee, your only option is to have users sign up on the web and pay there, then have a login they can use in your app. Then it's a matter of trying to prevent duplicate logins on you server, although as a last point of thought, I can't remember a business that succeeded by refusing people's money.
You could generate an unique id on the phone, store it in the keychain, and use that to communicate with the server.
Since you are creating your own account management system, just save the user information once they do the account creation bit and never show the option again. Because developers no longer have access to the device id, you may have problems identifying an existing user if they delete and re-install the app, but I am not sure that there is a solution to that problem.
Edit: As a commenter to this question mentioned, you can save things to the keychain. Check out this link for a good lib for modifying the keychain.
I have a client that needs to have its volunteers purchase an IAP (A data package that is downloaded), then somehow reimburse them. The problem is that there is no easy way to do this that I think Apple will approve of. Especially for over 1500 people. I've come up with several ways of doing this with their pros and cons, which one would be best to implement and does anyone have any other suggestions on how to do this?
1) Have the client send out iTunes gift cards via email. The IAP is $7, and you can't send a gift card less than $10. Also, they would have to send them one at a time, there is no way to send bulk. Not going to work
2) Create gift codes like iTunes gift cards. My client can purchase codes in bulk via IAP (so Apple still gets their money), and store them on my web server securely. I can then implement a system to send all the codes to a single email, or individually to multiple emails. Then the volunteers can use the codes to unlock that single IAP. This would be more work on my part, but easier for my client. Something tells me Apple probably would not approve of this method.
3) Create "Credits" that the client can purchase in bulk via IAP (so Apple still gets their money), then gift either the credits or send the IAP info itself to the volunteers via a p2p bluetooth connection created with game kit. This would be harder for the client, as they would have to send each "Credit" individually. But I think Apple would be more likely to approve this.
4) Have the client send me a list of UUIDs for each of the volunteers devices. I add the UUIDs to a secure list on my server. During the purchase the a check is preformed to see if the devices UUID matches one on my server. If it is, they are marked as "all ready paid" and given the IAP data. I don't know about this one, as the only way I can see the money transfer happening is myself getting paid directly, and Apple being left out (So they probably wouldn't approve of this. I have no problem giving Apple their 30% if I could find a way to get that to work with this.
I'd go with Option 5, and create my own IAP system. Much like Option 3, but bypassing Apple all together. Add a Custom URL Scheme to you application, give it to your client to distribute. When your app is launched by its Custom URL Scheme have it open to a promo code entry page.
Your client would be able to purchase/create codes as necessary via a website that you set up for them. You would then store the codes (or create an algorithm to check generated codes against), and validate the codes as the users enter them.
Then your clients users would enter their unique code and have everything unlocked/downloaded as needed.
I have done a similar set up with promo codes to unlock the full version of my applications so I could create my own promotions, without making the upgrades free for everyone by removing/altering the IAP.