I have a 'light'/'free' application and a full version of this app.
I want to make sure that if a user has the free version and purchases the full version,
then they will get a message asking if they want to merge the state of the free app into the full one.
Can this be done using iCloud?
This requires that both applications use the same Team ID. As long as they are setup with this same Team ID in the entitlements, they can share content.
Reference document
Related
Is there any guideline before unpublish app from App Store and Google Play? Like do I need to backup the Certificates, Identifier & Profile from Apple developer first?
I just worry if in future I would like to republish the app, I might missed out something to release back the app.
Thanks.
In case of iOS Apps :
You just need to take care of latest source & bundle you are using no other things required to backup
Also you can take back up of graphics assets, Any keys you are using on live push notification certificates, Facebook App ID, Ad Ids
something like you can take a record of all in 1 version control sheet
Regarding app certificates & provisioning can be revoked any time so that will not be an issue
In case of Android Apps :
Specifically you have to take back of the key store files along with the password. This is something that if you will loose them you
will not be able to submit that app in future with same bundle id. So
its important
Other is similar as iOS Apps you need to take back of latest source, assets & keys & also create a version control documentation
I hope this will help you.
My company had outsourced an iOS app to another company, and they published the app on the App Store using their Apple ID. The app have been available for download for a few months and has a number of users. Now my company developed a slightly newer version of the app and would like to distribute the app using our own Apple ID. What's the correct way to do it? The major concerns we have are:
Should we submit the newer version using our ID before or after we take the old app down from the App Store. Would it happen that the newer app get rejected because Apple feel the two apps are too similar? (Actually they are quite similar, for that the update is slim.)
Is there a graceful way to notify the currently online app's users that they should switch to the newer app? And How to coordinate it, since the newer app may take a certain amount of time to get approved.
Thanks.
There are some different scenarios here, I am going to try to address some of them to see which one helps you the most:
1-)You have a current application that contains no use of push notification and no use of in app purchase. This is the easiest one. Basically, It does not matter what version the user has had before. You can remove the old one from the previous developer account and add it to the new developer account. By completely removing the previous application (not just from the app store listing, but from the developer account), you can reuse the bundle ID. When the user reinstall the app, the user will be able to replace the old application with the new application (note that the new application will not appear on the user's update list).
2-)You have push notification. Here, you will have to keep the old application if you wish to maintain the push notification certificates, so, the new application will have to use a new bundle ID, which means that the app will appear on the user as a new application, and the user will be able to have both app simultaneously.
3-)You have in app purchase and subscriptions. You will need to remove the old in app purchase entries from the old developer account, and add it to the new account (if you wish to reuse the product id, if not, you will have to create it either way).
I am not sure what kind of measure you need to take if you are using iCloud and/or other services. Best course of action is to contact Apple developer support. They will give you some guidance on what to do with your specific case. Also, when submitting, make sure to point to the reviewer that you are trying to move the application from one company to another. I think they can access review notes from the review to the previous submission(instead of reviewing it as a new app), and speed up the process.
Edit: You can not transfer apps between companies using iTunes connect. More information here: link
If I offer an in-app Non-consumable purchase (say a book, or a song) within my app and then 2-3 months after it has been released I realize that there is something wrong with my digital content, Can I do an update of the digital content? So if I had a digital article as an in-app purchases for $1.99 and sold 1,000 copies, then I realized that I have a spelling error on page 3. Would I be able to upload an updated article that would go out to all the people who bought the article and prevent people from downloading the old copy? If not, how is this situation handled in the real world? I have looked in apples doc, but cannot find an answer.
Edit: Assume I am using the new io6 feature of hosting the content through apple.
Yes, as a matter of fact, provided that you do a few steps, you can keep track and systematically, efficiently keep track of what is downloaded.
1.Yes it's possible. Provided you keep a track of who has bought what pack (ie. keep a bool value as an NSUserDefault), then they will still have access to it (even if you add more stuff/levels to it).
2.It depends what you mean by notified; they will know if they read the update comments when they install the update. Also you could just choose to alert them when the load the app after the update - your call.
3.If you're submitting the code Apple will review it. Just think of it like any other update to an app.
This is taken directly from here: Update in-app purchase content for iOS app?
After you have updated your content for the app store, you can allow your users to Restore Purchases and obtain the updated content!
Overall, have a mechanism to keep track of the version of the in-App purchases' version and then update when needed!
There is always, apple's own documentation:
Here you go! :)
I hope this is clear and helpful!
EDIT:
After checking the user's content version number and finding that it's outdated, you would call the method (by the way, you would probably implement this checking mechanism in your app delegate.
[[SKPaymentQueue defaultQueue] restoreCompletedTransactions];
This would restore the transactions, but make sure you also need to include the rest of the implementation code!
I assume you know the code to restore in app purchases, but if not, here are a couple good links!
Restore already bought in-app-purchases on iPhone?
http://www.iosdeveloperguide.com/in-app-purchase-heads-up-to-avoid-app-rejection/
http://appotography.com/2011/07/06/restoring-purchases-on-iphone-and-ipad/
About AppStore Hosted Content
I have not tried, but browsing inside Apple doc, I've found this which confirms that you can upload multiple versions of a digital content hosted by Apple.
"You can have multiple versions of hosted content, but each one needs to be approved by Apple before it can be purchased by users."
Also, you can check this and this tutorials, that shows that you have to specify the Content Version and IAP ProductIdentifier in the ContentInfo.plist when you create an App Store Hosted Content with Xcode.
How to notify the users that content has changed
This depends of how you implement your purchase system, the content delivery, and how you keep track of the "state of your purchased products". Usually we keep track of the version of the purchased products, thats means, we save the product_id with the content version when the purchased content is downloaded. We can save this data in files or inside a DB locally. Also, you don't have to worry about non downloaded (and non purchased) products, those do not need an update. When you update your in-app store with the last information of your available products (via update button, or app launch, or whatever you implemented) you should compare the last content versions with those you have downloaded, then you can notify the user that an update of his purchased product is available. Finally, you have to enable the download for that product.
This all depends on how you make the content available to the user. When the user makes their original purchase of the in-app content, where does the content come from?
If it is part of the app bundle, then the only way to get updated content to these users is to submit an update to your app that includes the updated content. When the user installs the updated app, they will see the updated content.
If, upon purchase, the app downloads the content from your server then you can build in a mechanism in your app that checks your server for updated versions of the content. If it detects there is an update, and the user has the IAP, then the app can download the updated content.
Edit: This doesn't cover the new iOS 6 feature of Apple hosted downloadable content.
For the above problem:
please have a look at the following urls for separate things:
Following link is the link to the SKDownload API:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/StoreKit/Reference/SKDownload_Ref/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40011851
Following link is the link to a great post which explains the working of SKDownload API:
How to download In-App hosted content?
Now in your position we can follow the following steps:
Push another package on the Apple Account which is to be hosted (with corrections).
Push an update the app on the App store with the following changes: (This handles any new download from the new users.)
a. Update your code of the InAppPurchase with the new identifier of the file
Now we have to handle the old users, we can consider the following two approaches:
a. We can show the user a restore button, by tapping which the user would be downloading the article again.
b. In iOS for things to go automatically to all existing users we do have a mechanism of push notifications, on the receiving of this the user would be triggering the event to again download the data from the Apple Hosting.
How could a full version of my iOS app access / copy the database / settings from the free version ?
I'm thinking of providing a free version of my app and I can't see how people then buying the full version could get access to the data from my free version ?
All apps are isolated on iOS. They are installed as different iOS system users. One user do not have permission to access another user's files. In the old times, one common approach to address this problem is to enable iTunes file sharing. And tell users to manually copy the files.
Your better bet is to use the freemium model to sell your app. Make the app free, and unlock extra features via in-app-purchase. This way, your files, documents, settings won't need transferring to the pro version. The app itself becomes pro after unlocking.
Here is the guide from Apple: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StoreKitGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html (though not very intuitive).
The walkthrough here: http://troybrant.net/blog/2010/01/in-app-purchases-a-full-walkthrough/ is very helpful.
Last but not least, be aware that in-app-purchase is crackable. So please read: How to detect "IAP crackers"? , Verifying In App Purchase Receipt from Client , and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4715414/apple-in-app-purchase-verify-receipt , verify in app purchase , In App Purchase Receipt verification within app .
Note that you are supposed to setup a server to validate iap receipts. Though it's doable from within the app, it's not safe. As far as I can remember, you can test in-app-purchase through StoreKit in iOS simulator v5.0, that should be Xcode 4.2. Before that, it can only be tested on a device.
#Dominik Hadl mentioned you can use a server to sync the file. The operation is usually complicated. If you prefer this idea, you can choose to use custom url scheme to launch one app from another to ease the operation. See steps below:
User press "Begin sync" in the free app to upload the file to your server
Server return the ID of the file to the free app
User press "Launch Pro App and Download my file", which leads to a custom url scheme to launch your Pro version (must be installed first), with the file ID
Pro version use the file ID to download that file directly
I think the only way how you can do this is syncing the data with some server, registering the device and the syncing the data back to the full version.
Because all iOS apps are sandboxed, they can't access any other application data (unless you have jailbroken iOS).
Since multiple apps can share the same iCloud container, I'd say that the best practice nowadays is to "simply" store the data in iCloud.
(I'm putting "simply" under quotes, because it is easy to put data in iCloud and take it out; but if you actually want to do syncing, you may need to do more than just "I'll load from iCloud and save to iCloud" in order to provide the best experience to the user.)
due to a Licence Conflict with the Name of one of my Applications I had to remove it from the App Store.
If I rerelease it under a different name, is there a way I could reduce the price for people who previously bought the old App?
I'm going to add a lot of new features , still it is going to be the same program.
Did any one experience somthing like this before?
Hi unfortunately this is not possible if you are creating a new app to migrate users from an existing app free of charge.
If the old app is still on iTunes, you can just change the name there and in your plist file and continue to use the same bundle identifier, Your old users will receive the new application as a free update, however it sounds like your application has been removed
One option would be to make the app available for free for a period and before any marketing campaign took place, then inform the users of the old application that the new application is available free of charge if they update now, once it is felt you have enough of your old users on the application you could raise the pricing tier of the new application