Apologies if this question has an obvious answer, but dozens of Google and Stack Overflow searches haven't brought me any closer to the answer...
We have an iOS app that uses In-App Purchase to allow users to sign up for a subscription. This subscription automatically bills monthly. In iTunes Connect I can see the total number of subscription transactions being processed each month, but I can't see how many subscribers we're adding / retaining.
Ideally, we'd like to be able to see:
Total number of active subscribers
Number of new subscribers in this period
Number of cancellations in this period
Any ideas on how to find this info - either from iTunes Connect or a third-party solution - would be appreciated. Thanks!
I received an email today that you now have visibility to active subscriptions. Log into iTunes connect, Go to "Sales and Trends" then select "Subscriptions" from the report chooser.
Report Chooser
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I am working on shifting my existing iOS 10+ app to offer auto-renewing subscriptions.
While "normal" subscriptions (no introductory offer) work fine both within my app and on my server (receipt validation and user account handling) I am having a hard time to understand how a free trial period can be offered.
Setting up the free trial period in App Store Connect is no problem, but I do not understand how to implement it in my app and on my server.
Problem 1 : Understanding eligibility
From the Apple docs:
You can make introductory offers to customers who haven’t previously
received an introductory offer for the given product, or for any
products in the same subscription group (...)
Before offering introductory price, you must first determine if the
user is eligible to receive it (...)
To determine if a user is eligible for an introductory offer, check their receipt...
Assume I have setup a subscription with a 7 day free trial. A user purchases this subscriptions, uses the free trial and continues the paid subscriptions for a while before the subscription is canceled. Some time later the wants to continue the subscriptions
What happens if the user purchases the same subscription product again?
Will fail because he has already used the free trial? ("... who haven’t previously received an introductory offer...")
Will it start with another free trial period? (== Store does not check the eligibility at all)
Will it start with no free trial but directly with a payed period
In other words:
Is checking the eligibility only necessary to show the right UI (= grant offer yes/no is checked by store) or to make sure the user does not benefits from the same offer (= grant offer yes/no is checked by app)?
Problem 2 : How to check eligibility?
As described in the apple docs the best way to check the eligibility is to validate the app receipt and to check whether an introductory offer has been received or not. This should be done as early as possible, at app start at best.
Fine, but as far as I know the receipt is not guaranteed to be available. If no receipt can be found the user has to first provide his app store credentials to download the receipt...
It would be quite annoying if the first thing the app does on the the first start would be to ask the user to login to the store.
Is this really the intended implementation?
Problem 3 : How to handle eligibility?
Assume that I have successfully check whether the user is eligible to receive an offer or not: How to provide the offer?
Do I have to setup two different subscription products in App Store Connect (one with free trial and one without) to let the user purchase the one or the other?
Or the eligibility check only necessary to display the correct UI ("Purchase now with free trial" vs "Purchase now") while I can use the same product in both cases?
Problem 1 : Understanding eligibility
He will be charged for the subscription immediately. Free-trial can be availed only once
Problem 3 : How to handle eligibility?
Do I have to setup two different subscription products in App Store Connect (one with free trial and one without) to let the user
purchase the one or the other?
No. You only need to setup one product and add Introductory offer (free trial or intro offer)
Or the eligibility check only necessary to display the correct UI ("Purchase now with free trial" vs "Purchase now") while I can use the same product in both cases?
It is only for showing correct CTA and messaging. At the end of the day, Store(Apple) is the one who is taking the decision if user will get free-trial or not
To check eligibility of the user you need to pass the receipt to your server. Your server can then query Apple for the decoded receipt (/verifyReceipt endpoint). In decoded receipt, check all the txn in latest_renewal_info list. if you find is_in_free_trial field to be true for any product in same subscription group then you can safely assume that user has used free trial before and show right messaging to the user.
Also, user can get free trial only once per subscription group even if all the products under that have free trial enabled.
I agree that Apple would have provided eligibility in the app itself while querying the product. But trust me none of the App stores provide this information including Google.
As far as login is concerned, the receipt is always present at a sandbox location and can be retrieved from there. (Also, do consider that user anyway can't buy the subscription if he is not logged in)
I have an app that has a 1-month trial of an in-app auto-renewing subscription. This past week I've been able to get over 300 trial sign ups. What I'm NOT seeing is any cancellations during the trial period, and I find that hard to believe.
Does App Store Connect show cancellations that happen during a trial period or not, because right now I am showing ZERO cancellations? Am I just really fortunate with my numbers here? Or am I flying blind and the numbers aren't telling me the full story yet?
In App Store Connect, under Sales and Trends > Subscriptions > Summary, I am showing the following:
I finally found cancellation ("churn") metrics in App Store Connect.
Go to the Trends module, then in the sidebar under "Subscriptions" click on Summary and Retention — each of those pages has some metrics related to cancellation. In some places they split out conversion rates from trials, promotions, and renewals.
We are currently offering a variety of premium plans on our app using in-app purchases and not Subscriptions. We have a 4 months plan and 1 year plan when user pays from the start (he can cancel at any-time by contacting us and our back-end manages the plans so after the period of the plan has ended he is downgraded automatically) and we want to switch this mechanism to monthly payments subscriptions for better revenue reasons.
It looks as (at least on Google Play) that we can define the billing period by weekly, monthly, etc, but the period of the subscription is still indefinit by meaning of time.
Are subscriptions are "for life" until user cancels it? How does it work?
Is it possible to create a fixed 4 months or 1 year subscription that is paid monthly until its finished automatically? How can we define that a subscription needs to end after exactly 4 months since user first purchase it? (It should also be auto-renewal month by month in that period).
If this is not possible, can we somehow create an indefinit subscriptions and "cancel" the subscription on iOS and Google Play stores for the user without him knowing? (from back-end or clients)
Also, what happens if user to buy a different subscription while he is already in one? Should he cancel and also then buy?
Thanks for any clarification. The official guidelines by both companies are no so clear.
I'm currently working on an iOS app that will allow users to purchase an auto-renew subscription to access service charged monthly. I would like to be able to offer a basic and premium service, and allow users to upgrade or downgrade from one or the other.
I've set up test users and some test products and I've found that if you select the basic subscription first and then later on select to purchase the premium subscription the test user is charged for both services simultaneously.
Does anyone know if its possible to programmatically cancel a users current subscription when we've noticed they've either upgraded or downgraded their service, so they are only being charged once?
I've seen that using this link
https://buy.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/manageSubscriptions
Allows a user to manage their subscriptions manually, but I would like to handle migrating them to their new plan automatically.
The control over the subscription once purchased is by the user. Only the user who purchased can cancel the renewal. As a developer you can't do any changes.
After a discussion with someone at Apple the answer to this is question is that there is no support for multiple product subscriptions with the same duration. They would not comment on how certain apps are able to do this. Officially it's not possible.
Our app that is in development will have the following 2 IAPs set up:
$12.99/mo as an auto-renewable subscription.
$9.99/mo as an auto-renewable subscription (if you've entered an invite code).
Obviously if the user enters the invite code BEFORE subscribing, we can ping the Apple servers with the lower-price IAP.
But our issue is: We're (planning on) allowing users to enter the invite code whenever they want, including AFTER they're already a paying subscriber. That way we can offer the discount for any future months they're a subscriber within our app.
Has anyone done this? Is this possible? Etc...
Update 8/30/2015:
Unless someone provides us with the knowledge / ability to do otherwise, we've come to the conclusion that it's NOT possible. We even reached out to Apple and they said there's no API for such thing on their end.
That being said, we're going with the following approach:
If a user subscribes BEFORE an invite code is entered, they're charged the higher of the 2 prices.
If a user enters a code while ALREADY subscribed, they must unsubscribe, then re-subscribe to obtain the lower price point.
If a user subscribes AFTER an invite code is entered, they're charged the lower of the 2 prices.
UPDATE 9/23/2016
there's something called Subscription Groups in iTunes Connect that Apple recently introduced with Auto-Renew subscriptions. A user is only allowed to subscribe to 1 of the subscriptions within a group at a time. Thereby allowing a user to shift between "tiers". This is a possible solution to those coming across this question in the future.