I have been looking for a solution for a question for a while without any real luck. Is there a way to bulk create non-consumable in-App purchases via iTunes Connect? I have roughly 20,000 individual items within my app that can be unlocked via in-App purchase.
If there is not a bulk upload option, which I suspect there is not, is there a way to just place a single generic in-App purchase that will unlock a selected item? For example I would present a table view with items available for unlocking based on user search criteria, each has a unique ID, with a button that would purchase that item that is selected. All the items are the same price and of the same type. Seems like this should work but I have not idea how to implement it with the in-App purchase confines.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
There's actually a way: uploading a csv(comma seperated values) text file, containing the products' metadata, and uploading it through Application Loader.
Check This Post
Quoting:
You can use the Application Loader to mass import in app purchases: https://itunesconnect.apple.com/docs/UsingApplicationLoader.pdf
Read the "Creating a Package from a File" section on page 15:
You can create a package containing the In-App Purchase you want to submit to iTunes by importing details from an Application Loader file and adding and editing the metadata. When creating a package from a file, be sure to use the Application Loader template. To get a copy of the template, choose File > Open App Import Template in Application Loader 2.9. Application Loader creates the AppFileImportTemplates folder containing the AppMassImportTemplate.txt template. To always have an original version of the template file, be sure to make a copy of the template before editing.
Regards
I think, that making 20.000 items in iTunes Connect isn't a right choice for you,
You can try to combine Apple's iAP with your server — just make several tiers of IAP(1$,2$,3$), each responsible for a variety of items with the same price, and on your server take track of what specific item have user purchase.
Because there is no default solution, provided by Apple, to make such kind of Store.
Related
How to deal with dynamic products in In-App purchase? We have an existing website having and admin panel where user adds his/her courses. There are thousands of courses and every day lots of courses created there.
Its not possible to add those courses to Apple In-App Purchase portal. Is there any other solution to use dynamic products to In-App Purchase? there are discounts and promotional coupons also applied. Is there any API exists which we can configure to our admin panel and course will automatically added to In-App?
Please help me and save my life...
There are four steps to add multiple IAPs to iTunes Connect using the Application Loader (Version 3.0 at the time of writing):
Open the Application Loader and access the template via the menu
"File" --> "Open App Import Template". Copy the template somewhere
else and open it with Excel or something similar.
Add all your IAP Information and save the file as a .txt. (Leave the
screenshot column empty.)
Create a directory where you add screenshots for each IAP. The
filename should match the product id of the IAP item. Example:
"com.companyname.appname.productId.png".
Use the import function of the Application Loader, where you will
provide the .txt and will be asked for the screenshots.
If everything goes well your IAPs are now added and you can open iTunes Connect to submit them for review.
Hope this will help you. or you can use some command line tool provided by iTunes connect called Transporter. more details here http://itunespartner.apple.com/en/movies/faq/Transporter_Getting%20Set%20Up#!
Unfortunately, there is nothing like that. You have to manually create product identifiers for in-app purchase. The product identifiers for which added in portal, those only works.
Building an iOS App in Swift. Quick question about IAP's I want to implement. Currently, I have my In-App Purchases fixed in my app. Meaning, I would have to push an update to the app in order to change the visible information about the IAP, etc.
Does Apple allow me to store this In-App Purchase data in my cloud(Parse), or does it have to be local? Of course, the IAP's would have to be approved in iTunes Connect, but don't have to be used if they are approved.
My goal is to alternate through different plans without having to go through an entire app update.
I feel like the answer is a big obvious yes, but I just wanted to confirm before I begin coding it all in.
Thanks!
It's up to you to decide where to store In-App Purchases.
Here is Apple documentation about storing in-app purchases data.
How to store product identifiers:
Every product you sell in your app has a unique product identifier.
Your app uses these product identifiers to fetch information about
products from the App Store, such as pricing, and to submit payment
requests when users purchase those products. Your app can either read
its list of product identifiers from a file in its app bundle or fetch
them from your server.
How to store associated content for purchased package:
You can embed that content in your app’s bundle or you can download it
as needed — each approach has its advantages and disadvantages.
Embed smaller files (up to a few megabytes) in your app.
Download larger files when needed.
Personally I want to say that all projects I was working on used remote server for getting in-app purchases data.
You don't need care about app approval in this situation.
Yes, It is possible to store In-App Purchases on the Cloud(Parse).
The in-app purchases for iOS are done through the Apple app store. We do not take a cut or interact with the transaction in any way. We simplify the process of setting up in app purchases, take care of interacting with the Apple server, perform receipt validation to ensure your purchases are done securely, take care of delivering the purchased content through PFFiles if you choose to use this mechanism and also provide an easy to use UI component for use in your app.
if you want to know in detail visit here http://blog.parse.com/announcements/in-app-purchase/
Yes, you can do that using parse in swift(youtube)
and parse doc.
When using Apple hosted In-App purchase, is there any way to selectively download content, even though all content has been purchased? Let's say user purchased a set of PDF files, which contains hundreds of categorized PDFs, with total size over 100MB, but user only want to download some of them at any given time. Then he may delete or leave it and download more files. Does IAP API provide such selective way of downloading content from Apple hosted servers?
No, you can set one package for one IAP product.
The only solution I can think of (With out using an other server), is to use the new "free" products that has been added in iOS7.
If that is possible you can set a free product for every PDF file, and enable the "purchase" and don't show this products to the users. And then when the user buys the "All PDF's" product, you can show them the list of the free products and allow them to get them.
The downside is that they will have to pass the "Free Purchase" process for each file.
I have an old app with in app purchase items. We are moving to a totally new app that will sell the same items while the old one will not be in use.
Can we move the items to the new app in iTunes connect?
No, you cannot. The IAP process is governed completely by Apple. You can probably set up a server generating promo codes for the users of the old app. And using the promo code unlocks the features in the new app?
Or some document type that could be sent via email and when your app opens it, unlocks the content.
You will need some mechanism to ensure these (either the promo code or the files) are used just once.
I'm developing an app where the user can purchase digital maps, charts and so on. I'd like to wrap these in in-app-purchases. The thing is that I don't know beforehand how many charts there will be, as I'm getting them from another source from the net. There could be hundreds.
I have a server that periodically gets the charts from that source and stores them locally; there may appear new charts in the future or disappear existing ones. All this without manual intervention.
There are three distinct types of charts.
My first solution was to create three consumable items and let the user buy these; this was working fine but unfortunately Apple rejected it, since they require charts to be "non consumable".
But I'm quite at a loss how to implement what I want with the non-consumable type. If I create these three types as non-consumable, and the user buys one, he will get all the other charts in that group for free, since a non-consumable item can only be bought once.
The only solution I can think of is to create a non-consumable item for every single chart. But that's something I want to avoid at all costs: as it is now, the charts are periodically fetched from the remote source without any manual work on my side. I'd like to keep it that way. I don't want to manually create a new non consumable purchases every time a new chart appears.
Any ideas how to make this scalable?
I can't completely spell it out for you with code but you can handle this problem two ways:
Currency.
You do not sell non-consumable items such as maps. You sell currency. With that currency you purchase maps. The maps you feed dynamically whenever the user hits your store front. That way you only need to track a few purchase options.
The other option:
The company I worked for initially set this up very simply. Our app would launch and we would reach out for a php script that handed us back the app store IDs that we had sitting in it. At that point we'd verify them and use the valid returns. This option allowed us to change our in app purchases through iTunes Connect and then in the script and everything was great.
This is an older post, but I just had the same question and found out there is now a way to dynamically provide non-consumables by hosting the product identifier list on your own server:
Every product you sell in your app has a unique product identifier.
Your app uses these product identifiers to fetch information about
products from the App Store, such as pricing, and to submit payment
requests when users purchase those products. Your app can either read
its list of product identifiers from a file in its app bundle or fetch
them from your server.
If your app has a fixed list of products, such as an in-app purchase
to remove ads or enable functionality, embed the list in the app
bundle. If the list of product identifiers can change without your app
needing to be updated, such as a game that supports additional levels
or characters, have your app fetch the list from your server.
There’s no runtime mechanism to fetch a list of all products
configured in iTunes Connect for a particular app. You’re responsible
for managing your app’s list of products and providing that
information to your app. If you need to manage a large number of
products, consider using the bulk XML upload/download feature in
iTunes Connect.
Apple Developer In-App Purchasing Guide
I think your limit on items is something massive like 10,000 or so.
Pre-create a big number of items, add some code to check your website to see what your highest chart number is and make sure the users can only buy charts that you have.
The app downloads the chart names and corresponding product id from your server and then you're just buying a product.
Apple doesn't care if the actual product is already in the app and unlocked by the purchase, downloaded from their server or provided from your website.
Whether you have these purchased directly via IAP or through some kind of in-app "currency" you could simplify the amount of work you'd need to do in the future by using a naming system which would guarantee a unique map name for each item you want to sell. For example:
NSString *myMapName = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#%#%#%#", app_identifier, map_type, top_left_corner_location, scale];
This way if your server passes that information for a new map, there's a programmatic way to know what the IAP identifier should be— just make it the value of the string myMapName.
In the case where you use currency (which sounds easier than the alternative option, and is what lots of big apps out there seem to be doing) you just need to make a hash with some data in your map so that people can't guess the code you're storing in their keychain/plist and magically get all your maps without paying :)
In the case where you actually have individual IAPs for each map, sadly you do have to make an IAP for every possible map once. (But you can hire some kid to do that part for minimum wage, right? It's just data entry) They can be basic shells, though, with the actual info provided via your server as described above, once it's verified that the map has actually been purchased.
Hope this helps!