My customer wants to purchase my 2 In-App-Purchase products within one of my App on 16 ipads that her School District owns. However, due to their volume purchase program they cannot purchase them as in-app purchases. They want us to create a paid app for these contests so that they can purchase them. Is there any other way for both of us to adopt instead of creating a paid app for them separately?
I am a volume purchaser and have just run into this problem myself. As far as I can tell from my research the only way around this issue is for the developer to create a paid for 'FULL Version' that contains all the features of the in-app purchases.
If anyone comes up with a better way please do share!
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I am having a programmer code my iOS app, which he has done great. However, due to a new competitor we have decided to change from our current revenue model with In-App Purchases as subscription based to just having users pay a one-time fee. He tells me it'll take a lot of hours to make that change. Is it really true that there is no easy way around changing the code from having renewable purchases to simply have one-time purchases?
Well, this is a very objective question. It's impossible to tell you with any certainty without reviewing the actual code, but here are a few of the obstacles your developer may face:
The methods to buy a subscription is slightly different to buying a non-consumable product, however the app will need to continue to provide content users who are currently paying for a subscription. There is no way to change a subscription to a non-consumable product in iTunes Connect, and you may need to, or should ask and remind the user to cancel their subscription to prevent further renewals (you can't do this yourself or in the app, you can only link to the subscriptions page in their iTunes settings).
The app will need to check for either the subscription product (active or expired) or the non-consumable product has been purchased in order to provide the content. Support for this will need to be on the start of the app, purchase of a product and on the restore in-app purchases function.
There may be further complexities too, particularly if your app uses a backend API that syncs purchase information with a user account.
In conclusion, it's non-trivial, if your developer says it will take a lot of hours, I would be inclined to believe him.
I’m developing a Marketplace App of the courses for the Learning Purposes and we don’t have any kind of control over uploading of Physical content( CDs, DVDs, Hard Copy of the book, etc. ) or the Digital Content (Videos, Audios, Ebooks, etc.) on the courses uploaded by the seller for the consumers to purchase.
So could you please suggest what kind of payment method should we use apart from In-App purchases?
If we are bound to use In-App purchase then how should we implement it in our App and also we have following queries to clear our doubts for the monetization of the app.
Could we add n number of courses dynamically having digital and physical content with In-App Purchases implemented? In our app the courses limit is not fixed, it can be 5000, 10000 or 100000.
Will it be possible for the sellers to provide any kind of discounts for the existing courses?
How could we manage(addition or deletion) the courses dynamically with In-App purchases?
I researched on google but no solution was found. Some solutions were found on StackOverflow but we can't find proper guidelines for our queries. Thanks :)
This seems to be partly an opinion-based question, but with regards to IAPs there are a couple of important rules:
1) For all digital goods, you have to use in-app purchases, otherwise Apple will not approve your app. There are different approaches to your problem. You could either let people buy credits with IAPs and then dynamically create the store on your own. Then you have 100% control over discounts etc.) Or each product will be its own IAP, but this will create lots of "overhead" as you have to get approval for each IAP.
2) For physical goods you are not allowed to use in-app purchases. There you have to find a 3rd party payment provider.
I have a magazine app, and I want to provide users a one year auto-renewable subscription, and for non-subscribed users, they can use non-consumable IAPs to pay for each issue and then download it. What is the best way to implement it?
For auto-renewable subscription I don't think it's a problem. I can follow the tutorial at http://www.viggiosoft.com/blog/blog/2011/10/29/at-newsstand-and-subscriptions/ to finish this part. But for the non-consumable IAP part, I'm not sure. Do I need to add all the non-consumable IAPs for future issues before I submit the app? If I do this, how could Apple review my IAPs, because the future issues are not prepared at the reviewing time. Or, can I add non-consumable IAPs after my app is published to the App store? For example, every time when a new issue is ready in our server, we add a new non-soncumable IAP in iTC, and also set the product id to the issue in the server. When the non-subscribed user click that issue, the purchase for the specified product id will start. Is it possible?
After some research I found that the best way to implement it is to set up a new non-consumable IAP at each time when you want to publish a new issue.
The only problem is that, each IAP needs to be submitted for review, and before it is approved, the users who try to buy the issue will get an error message: "Cannot connect to the iTunes store". I haven't figured out how to know that the IAP is in review, so I can popup a nicer message like "Issue is review, please wait" other than a confusing error message.
I have a magazine app, and I want to provide users a one year
auto-renewable subscription, and for non-subscribed users, they can
use non-consumable IAPs to pay for each issue and then download it.
What is the best way to implement it?
You should accept your solution, but here is another case, maybe it helps you or others:
The subscribers can have they magazines, which are not in at iTunes Server, but at your hosting. Those magazines not need to bypass the apple review.
It depends whether you want a user to be able to permanently have a record stored in their app receipt of the issues they have bought. You might want this, if you want a user to be able to delete the app, with all associated content, then later re-install the app, and be able to download the specific back issues they purchased previously—all without having any user account on your own server. The use of a non-consumable in-app purchase also enables you to give them access to these issues across multiple devices that are signed in to that Apple ID, again without having to run your own user account-server combination to track purchased issues.
If these features don't matter to you, then there is a solution you could consider that is much simpler where you don't have to keep creating new in-app purchase products. Have a consumable in-app purchase product that is called something like Purchase One Issue. When a person buys this product, they get one credit and they can use this to select the issue they wish to be given access to. Your app then gives them access to that issue. You could also of course reverse this process in the UX: they pick the issue, click buy, you send them into the purchase process for the Purchase One Issue product, and you automatically give them access to the selected issue since they already selected it.
Note: consumable in-app purchases are not stored in the app receipt, so a user couldn't use this approach to 'restore previous purchases'. In scenarios where this is acceptable however, this is a much less labour intensive approach once set up.
A client is asking if it's possible to use a subscription or In-App Purchase in a Custom B2B app.
The VPP Business Guide from Apple doesn't mention In-App Purchases or subscriptions at all, so I'm unclear as to whether this is possible.
It seems like it ought to work, but I'd love to hear from someone who has tried it or found documentation one way or another.
The new B2B program is much better than the old one. That said, the old one allowed in-app for B2B. Here is the text from the old FAQ:
Can I use In-App Purchase or Subscriptions?
Yes, but please keep in mind that apps distributed to users using the
App Store Volume Purchase program are redeemed with the end-user's
Apple ID. Therefore, any in-app purchases or subscriptions will not
be billed to the credit card used to purchase your app, but rather the
account configured on the user's device. In-app purchases or
subscriptions are not recommended for custom B2B apps.
Unfortunately, I've been unable to find the same information in the new B2B documents. They just do not say anything about it.
I suspect they still allow (but do not recommend) it, because it's not mentioned in any of the documents, nor in the 2012 WWDC presentation video.
It's not an extremely common thing, so my suggestion would be to contact them directly. The website at the developer website contains a "contact us" link for B2B questions.
consider two apps:
Free Version with in-app purchases
Premium Version with in-app purchases
In-app purchases are certain items.
The premium version is able to do different things with those items.
I would like to sell the premium version, but keep the in-app purchases the user might have purchased within the free version-assuming the the user uses the same itunes account.
Is that possible?
Thanks in advance, marimba
The only way I know is to upload the customer's product list to a server, then give both programs access to the server. That doesn't solve the problem of having to create two sets of In-App Purchases in iTunes Connect.
BTW this is just ONE way that Apple's IAP is not up to the task.