Where do you update the server on a consumable in app purchase? - ios

So I have an app that has a consumable purchase and from what I have read a little more work is involved in terms of persisting some info on the server.
What I am not clear on is where does one update the server on a sucessful purchase? Is it
(void)completeTransaction:(SKPaymentTransaction *)transaction;
??
If it is indeed the above mentioned function, is it just a matter of making a web call and updating the server server? I am just trying to understand best practices and would appreciate any help.
much regards

I don't know if this counts as a valid answer, but you should maybe check out this article.
The blog post is from 2010, so one could say it's rather outdated! But i think it's worth a look and the provided example (completeTransaction method implementation) should be valid also.
Getting in app purchases to work is a lot more painful than it should be actually.

I did and do it in
- (void)paymentQueue:(SKPaymentQueue *)queue updatedTransactions:(NSArray *)transactions
...
case SKPaymentTransactionStatePurchased:
case SKPaymentTransactionStateRestored:
[self sendReceiptToServerAndValidateFurther:transaction.receiptData
it is then only a webcall to the server-side script which can validate the receipt with itunes and update its DB/send the data
btw some server php
function itunes_verify2($receiptData,$sandboxed) {
//itunes store url -- sandbox or not :)
$itunes_storeURL = "https://buy.itunes.apple.com/verifyReceipt";
if($sandboxed == true) {
$itunes_storeURL = "https://sandbox.itunes.apple.com/verifyReceipt";
}
log_action('itunes_verify2 using ' . $itunes_storeURL);
$post = array("receipt-data" => $receiptData );
$postData = json_encode($post);
$responseData = post_doRequest( $itunes_storeURL, $postData );
$response = json_decode($responseData);
if($responseArray->status == 0) {
return "YES";
} else {
log_action('failed to get status ok from ' . $reponseData);
return "NO";
}
}

I'll give a vote here for this SO question. Seems to have several examples.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4178214/ios-in-app-purchase-sample-code
From what I can tell, consumables do require your own hosting, as mentioned here:
iOS In App Purchases for Subscriptions and Consumables products
I have no personal experience with consumables, only with upgrade-type IAPs, which weren't too painful (relatively speaking).

Related

How to get a Transaction with StoreKit 2 to present a refund sheet?

I purchase a consumable product with StoreKit 2 using my device with Xcode:
let result = try await product.purchase()
switch result {
case .success(let verification):
switch verification {
case .verified(let transaction):
await transaction.finish() // comes here
...
}
it is successful (I get result with verified transaction in it, my server validates the receipt).
But I can't get any transactions after it (I need it to initiate iOS 15 refund in-app flow), nothing from these works: Transaction.currentEntitlements, Transaction.latest(for: productId), Transaction.currentEntitlement(for: productId) - always nil and []. Even Transaction.updates doesn't emit anything.
The only mention I got is https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/689480
Any ideas?
I ran into a similar issue with storekit2 and it looks like it’s by design, at least according to this apple response on the dev forums https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/687199
I haven’t looked if there is a way to do this in the original store kit api.

iOS: How to detect if a user is subscribed to an auto-renewable subscription

Hopefully the title is self-explanatory. I'm trying to do something like this:
checkIfUserIsSubscribedToProduct(productID, transactionID: "some-unique-transaction-string", completion: { error, status in
if error == nil {
if status == .Subscribed {
// do something fun
}
}
}
does anything like the hypothetical code I've provided exist? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills
Edit
In similar questions I keep seeing a generic answer of "oh you gotta validate the receipt" but no explanation on how, or even what a receipt is. Could someone provide me with how to "validate the receipt"? I tried this tutorial but didn't seem to work.
Edit - For Bounty
Please address the following situation: A user subscribes to my auto-renewable subscription and gets more digital content because of it - cool, implemented. But how do I check whether that subscription is still valid (i.e. they did not cancel their subscription) each time they open the app? What is the simplest solution to check this? Is there something like the hypothetical code I provided in my question? Please walk me through this and provide any further details on the subject that may be helpful.
I know everyone was very concerned about me and how I was doing on this - fear not, solved my problem. Main problem was that I tried Apple's example code from the documentation, but it wasn't working so I gave up on it. Then I came back to it and implemented it with Alamofire and it works great. Here's the code solution:
Swift 3:
let receiptURL = Bundle.main.appStoreReceiptURL
let receipt = NSData(contentsOf: receiptURL!)
let requestContents: [String: Any] = [
"receipt-data": receipt!.base64EncodedString(options: []),
"password": "your iTunes Connect shared secret"
]
let appleServer = receiptURL?.lastPathComponent == "sandboxReceipt" ? "sandbox" : "buy"
let stringURL = "https://\(appleServer).itunes.apple.com/verifyReceipt"
print("Loading user receipt: \(stringURL)...")
Alamofire.request(stringURL, method: .post, parameters: requestContents, encoding: JSONEncoding.default)
.responseJSON { response in
if let value = response.result.value as? NSDictionary {
print(value)
} else {
print("Receiving receipt from App Store failed: \(response.result)")
}
}
As some comments pointed out there's a couple flaws with these answers.
Calling /verifyReceipt from the client isn't secure.
Comparing expiration dates against the device clock can be spoofed by changing the time (always a fun hack to try after cancelling a free trial :) )
There are some other tutorials of how to set up a server to handle the receipt verification, but this is only part of the problem. Making a network request to unpack and validate a receipt on every app launch can lead to issues, so there should be some caching too to keep things running smoothly.
The RevenueCat SDK provides a good out-of-the box solution for this.
A couple reasons why I like this approach:
Validates receipt server side (without requiring me to set up a server)
Checks for an "active" subscription with a server timestamp so can't be spoofed by changing the device clock
Caches the result so it's super fast and works offline
There's some more details in this question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55404121/3166209
What it works down to is a simple function that you can call as often as needed and will return synchronously in most cases (since it's cached).
subscriptionStatus { (subscribed) in
if subscribed {
// Show that great pro content
}
}
What are you trying to achieve in particular? Do you want to check for a specific Apple ID?
I highly doubt that this is possible through the SDK. Referring to Is it possible to get the user's apple ID through the SDK? you can see that you can't even ask for the ID directly but rather services attached to it.
What would work is caching all transactions on your own server and search its database locally but that would require the app to ask for the user's Apple ID so the app could update the subscription state whenever it launches as it can check for IAP of the ID associated with the device.
However, the user could just type whatever he wanted - and it's unlikely to get this through Apple's app review process.
I am using MKSoreKit https://github.com/MugunthKumar/MKStoreKit for auto-renew subscriptions.but it is in objective c you can check the library code for solution.I am using it in my code and it is working fine.
using below method you can easily check subscription status..
if([MKStoreManager isProductPurchased:productIdentifier]) {
//unlock it
}
It gets the apple id from device and I think that is user specific

Apple In-App Purchase Receipt - validation on the server-side

I have a problem with validating an apple receipt on the server-side.
I tried to find a solution in the internet, but haven't succeeded.
So, description:
First of all, application is made for iOS7. Secondly, I have a few items ( type = Non-Renewing Subscription ). So user can buy one or multiple items and then he should manually renew them ( buy again ).
Applications sends a receipt to the server-side, I make a request to the Apple and get the result with a lot of in_app receipts. Something like:
"in_app":[
{
"quantity":"1", "product_id":"...", "transaction_id":"...",
"original_transaction_id":"...", "purchase_date":"...",
"purchase_date_ms":"...", "purchase_date_pst":"...",
"original_purchase_date":"...",
"original_purchase_date_ms":"...", "original_purchase_date_pst":"...",
"is_trial_period":"..."},
{
"quantity":"1", "product_id":"...",
"transaction_id":"...","original_transaction_id":"...",
"purchase_date":"...", "purchase_date_ms":"...",
"purchase_date_pst":"...", "original_purchase_date":"...",
"original_purchase_date_ms":"...", "original_purchase_date_pst":"...",
"is_trial_period":"..."}
]
So, each "receipt" in "in_app" has transaction_id. But how I can identify the transactionId of the current purchase? I would like to validate it as well and make sure that this is unique.
My concern is: if somebody will get one valid receipt, he will be able to hack our server-side API and make unlimited numbers of in-app purchases with the same valid receipt.
Should I somehow decrypt and check for transaction_id the "original" receipt, the one what I send to Apple for verification?
Any help/suggestions would be highly appreciated.
Thank you in advance.
Regards,
Maksim
#Doug Smith
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/releasenotes/General/ValidateAppStoreReceipt/Chapters/ReceiptFields.html
If you go through the different fields on this page, you will find
Original Transaction Identifier::
For a transaction that restores a previous transaction, the transaction identifier of the original transaction. Otherwise, identical to the transaction identifier.
This value corresponds to the original transaction’s transactionIdentifier property.
All receipts in a chain of renewals for an auto-renewable subscription have the same value for this field.
So for your non-auto renewable subscriptions, you have to keep track of two things on your server side:
The original transaction identifier of the receipt that you are validating with itunes server, associate this with the user Id in your database.
Whether the request that you received from the client side is of a Purchase or of a Restore Purchase.
Once you have these two things with you, you can write your logic on these two parameters like below:
::If a request is of type "Purchase" and you already have the original transaction identifier of that receipt associated with some other user Id, you can block that purchase.
::If a request is of type "Restore Purchase" and request is coming from the same user id against which the original transaction identifier is associated in your DB than allow him otherwise block his restore.
Furthermore, you can derive your own logic based on these things, according to your needs.
Let me know if you have any further doubts.
For each new transaction apple send a new receipt which is unique, encode it so no one can forge data.
Get the transaction receipt from the completed transaction encode it and send it to your server, and on the server side decode it and match with the one apple send to server.
- (void)paymentQueue:(SKPaymentQueue *)queue updatedTransactions:(NSArray *)transactions
{
_transactionArray = transactions;
for (SKPaymentTransaction * transaction in transactions)
{
switch (transaction.transactionState)
{
case SKPaymentTransactionStatePurchased: {
NSData *receipt = transaction.transactionReceipt;
[self sendReceiptToServer];
} break;
case SKPaymentTransactionStateFailed: {
// finish this transaction
} break;
case SKPaymentTransactionStateRestored:
NSData *receipt = transaction.transactionReceipt;
[self sendReceiptToServer:receipt];
} break;
default:
break;
}
};
}
-(void)sendReceiptToServer:(NSData *)receipt {
// encode receipt
// send receipt to server
// add success and error callback
}
-(void) receiptSuccess {
// finish transaction here
}
-(void) receiptError {
// try again sending receipt to server
}

iOS OneDrive (skydrive) app displays permissions dialog every time it runs

I'm developing an iOS app that gives users access to their OneDrive/SkyDrive and I've run into a very annoying issue:
The very first time a user links the app to their OneDrive, everything goes as expected:
They have to enter a user id and password
Then they have to agree to let the app access their info
Then they get to browse their OneDrive
That's all good.
But, if the app closes, and you try to access the OneDrive again, rather than skipping straight to #3, and being able to access the OneDrive, they are stopped at step #2 (step 1 is skipped, as expected) and they have to agree again to let the app access their info.
The code is taken directly from the iOS examples in the online documentation (with some slight modification based on samples found here on Stack Overflow), but, here it is for inspection:
- (void) onedriveInitWithDelegate:(id)theDelegate {
self.onedriveClient = [[LiveConnectClient alloc] initWithClientId:MY_CLIENT_ID
delegate:theDelegate
userState:#"initialize"];
}
And then, theDelegate implements this:
- (void)authCompleted:(LiveConnectSessionStatus) status
session:(LiveConnectSession *) session
userState:(id) userState {
NSLog(#"Status: %u", status);
if ([userState isEqual:#"initialize"]) {
NSLog( #"authCompleted - Initialized.");
if (session == nil) {
[self.onedriveClient login:self
scopes:[NSArray arrayWithObjects:#"wl.basic", #"wl.signin", #"wl.skydrive_update", nil]
delegate:self
userState:#"signin"];
}
}
if ([userState isEqual:#"signin"]) {
if (session != nil) {
NSLog( #"authCompleted - Signed in.");
}
}
}
I thought that perhaps the status value might give a clue and that maybe I could avoid the login call, but it's always zero/undefined when I get to authCompleted after calling initWithClientId. (And session is always nil.)
Is there a scope I'm missing? Is there a different call to make rather than a straight-up login call? Or is it more complicated than that? I've seen reference to "refresh tokens" related to OAuth2 login, but I've not been able to find any concrete examples of how they might be used in this situation.
Any help and/or insights greatly appreciated.
Diz
Well, it turns out that the answer is pretty simple here. I just needed to add the "wl.offline_access" scope to my list of scopes during the initial login operation. The docs didn't really imply this type of behavior for this scope, but, that did the trick for me.
With this new scope added, subsequent invocations of the app no longer bring up the "agree to give the app these permissions" dialog, and I can go straight to browsing the OneDrive.
(Credit where it's due: Stephane Cavin over at the microsoft forums gave me the tip I needed to work this out. Gory details are here:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/8c5c7a99-7e49-401d-8616-d568eea3cef1/ios-onedrive-skydrive-app-displays-permissions-dialog-every-time-it-runs?forum=onedriveapi )
Diz

Survey application with offline capabilities and how to capture the data from multiple ipads to one?

I am trying to build a Survey application where the surveys will be taken offline on multiple ipads and when these ipads are online they are going to upload the data(survey answers) to our servers? I am really struggling how to send the survey to multiple ipads and more importantly to capture from different ipads to one source ?
I need help to clear my architecture part and I need some examples to do the coding part. Do you know anything similar?
What are you ideas?
Many Thanks in advance,
Arda
Create a web server to accept and send survey questions and answers.
I would envision an app that goes like this:
1) Slave iPads makes a HTTP POST request to server asking for the survey
This is usually done using a networking library for iOS like MKNetworkKit or AFNetworking. The general process is to:
create a NSDictionary of key-value pairs to form the HTTP POST request
submit the data through a block construct with completion handler
So something like:
MKNetworkOperation *op = [engine operationWithURLString:#"http://www.mywebserver.com/api/fetchQuestions"
params:nil
httpMethod:#"POST"];
2) Server receives request, grabs all survey questions in database and return JSON encoded questions to slave ipads.
I'm not sure what platform your web server is on but in the past, I used Symfony 2.0 which is a PHP web framework.
It provides very helpful tools like Doctrine (an Object Relational Mapper or ORM) to let me work with my MySQL data as if they're programming objects.
So my general process for fetching data would be something like:
// pseudo php function codes
public function sendSurveyQuestionAction()
{
$repository = $this->getDoctrine()->getRepository('MyAppBundle:Survey');
$query = $repository->createQueryBuilder('query')->getQuery();
$arrObjs = $query->getResult();
$arrObjDatas = NULL;
foreach($arrObjs as $obj)
{
$arrObjDatas[] = $obj->toArray();
}
$response = new Response(json_encode(array('data' => $arrObjDatas)));
$response->headers->set('Content-Type', 'application/json');
$return $response;
}
This would return all survey in JSON format, ready to be parsed by your master iPad app.
3) Users on slave iPads fill in the questions through the app UI and submits. The app saves
the data to disk, checks for a working internet connection before sending data back to server.
Submitting the answer is very similar grabbing the questions, so your iOS code should be something like:
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// store all question-answers into a dictionary to be submitted as HTTP POST variables
// obviously, you wouldn't create it here, this is just example code, you would likely
// have stored your questions and answers when user presses 'finish' button
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NSMutableDictionary *paramDictionary = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
[paramDictionary setObject:#"5" forKey:#"q1"];
[paramDictionary setObject:#"10" forKey:#"q2"];
[paramDictionary setObject:#"15" forKey:#"q3"];
// this helps your web server know how many question-answers to expect, or you could hard code it into your business logic
[paramDictionary setObject:[NSNumber numberWithInteger:3] forKey:#"numberOfQA"];
MKNetworkOperation *op = [engine operationWithURLString:#"http://www.mywebserver.com/api/submitAnswers"
params:paramDictionary
httpMethod:#"POST"];
This will submit your answers for each of your question. You may have noticed I used q1, q2, q3.
These are for your web server code to identify each questions and extract the respective answers from them.
4) Server receives finished answers and commit them to database
So if you were using Symfony 2.0 PHP code, then something like:
// pseudo php function
public function saveAnswersAction()
{
$numOfQA = $_REQUEST['numberOfQA'];
for($i = 0; $i < $numOfQA; $i++)
{
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------
// looping through all the questions such as q1, q2, q3, q4, q5....
// by appending the counter variable to the question identifier
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------
$currentAnswer = $_REQUEST['q'.$i];
// use Doctrine to create new answer entities, and fill in their data
$answerEntity.answer = $currentAnswer;
$surveyEntity->addAnswerEntity($answerEntity);
// mark survey as complete so we can fetch all 'completed' surveys later
$surveyEntity.complete = true;
}
// tell Doctrine to commit changes to MySQL Database
// return HTTP OK status message
}
5) Now all that's left is for your master iPad app to make a HTTP POST request to get all surveys.
The process is the same with your iOS code making a HTTP POST requesting for all 'completed' survey entities from your web server.
The web server grabs them and return them as JSON encoded data.
Your app then receives the completed surveys with question answer like this:
surveys
{
{
questionNumber: 1,
questionAnswer: "5"
},
{
questionNumber: 2,
questionAnswer: "10"
},
{
questionNumber: 3,
questionAnswer: "15"
}
}
Now you use JSONKit to parse this JSON data. You should end up with a NSDictionary from JSONKit.
You can then go something like:
// pseudo code
-(void)displayCompletedSurveys
{
[MKNetworkOperationEngine doRequest:
...
^completionBlock {
// parse JSON data
NSDictionary *surveyData = [JSONKit dictionaryFromJSONData:data)
NSEnumerator *enumerator = [surveyData enumerator];
NSDictionary *currentQuestion = nil;
while([enumerator nextObject] != nil)
{
// do something with each of your question-answer e.g. show it on screen
}
}];
}
Points To Consider
Most of the code above are pseudo-codes. Your final real code would probably be much more in depth.
You'll need to build some master login into your app to prevent everyone from seeing the completed surveys.
Some Extra Information You Should Know
Here are some extra information to help you
JSONKit for fast JSON data decoding from your web server
MKNetworking or AFNetworking to submit your data to your web server
You need to know how to write web services to handle accepting the survey answers. I recommend learning a web framework like Symfony 2.0
Hope that helps.

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