CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosobjective-cswiftxcodein-app-purchase
birdcage
birdcage

Reputation: 2676

Best strategy to Get In-App Purchase Auto-Renewable Subscription end date

I have been reading a lot about auto-renewable subscriptions but so far I could not get a satisfactory answer to my questions.

Imagine a user subscribed to my app for 1 month and the very first view of the app has some content that only visible with subscription. Now imagine it's the first day of second's month subscription (after auto-renewed). If I don't query the expiry date from apple server, user can't see subscription items, because the expiry date of first month already passed and we need to get the new expiry date.

My questions are:

1- Is there a way to get the end date of the subscription offline and without disturbing the user (with password prompt etc.)? How user will get subscription content if it is the first day of auto-renewed subscription (second month and so on) and if user don't have internet? Will he see locked content if he has no internet? If so this is sounds weird to me.

2- If it is not possible to get expiry date of auto-renewed subscription offline, what is the best approach to get expiry date of auto-renewed subscription without asking or prompting something to user? Because we want to show the very first page of the app with subscription content smoothly. What comes to my mind is to make user wait during launching and check expiry date from server.

I am sure many developers are still concerned with those issues.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1074

Answers (1)

Andrea
Andrea

Reputation: 26383

It's been a long time since the last time that I integrated an auto renewable subscription and it harder than I expected, but I can give you some general hints and some more specific for your question.
Starting from your question.

  • Not exactly, you can get the last updated receipt by asking getting the receipt from the receiptURL, here is where I've found a really gray area. I never had a chance to understand exactly when a receipt is updated automatically, probably this happen right after Apple charged you (of course this update needs a connection). This doesn't seems to happen when you have restored a purchase on another device.
  • Yes there are, when you have a chance to validate the receipt you can store the expire date somewhere (maybe in a secure way) and only before one or two days after that day try to validate it again. If you want you can apply also a grace period after.

    Other tips:
  • you MUST create a way to restore the purchase or your app will be rejected
  • on sandbox at the first launch the receipt will not exist, but in production an app will always have a receipt, maybe without subscription info, but there is. Thus if you want to simulate some use case in sandbox environment is better if you restore the purchase right after the launch of the application.
  • restore purchase always requires username and pwd and refresh receipt seems too

Maybe some of this info are a little bit outdated, I made the integration with iOS7 and never had a chance to update it.

Upvotes: 2

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