In my application, renewing period is 1 month. Validity Time for Auto-Renewables in Sandbox is 5 minutes. So transcation identifier will keep on changing after each 5 minutes.
Initially i will a buy the product. If I am successfull i will get SKPaymentTransaction object it contains all details about transcation like transactionIdentifier, transactionDate, transactionReceipt and transactionState. Till this I understood. If I call restore function, (i.e.restoreCompletedTransactions) I am getting all the completed transaction information. According to my knowledge the first transaction log information will be the late-stet transaction information.
When compare both the object's details are different. How come this is possible. I am totally confused, How to restore this Auto renewable transaction details. Any help is appreciated.
To confirm that user's subscription was renewed or not, restore completed transaction and send first transaction's receipt to apple. In response apple will send you current status of the transaction.
For detailed reference read following link
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StoreKitGuide/RenewableSubscriptions/RenewableSubscriptions.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008267-CH4-SW2
Specially Table 7-2 Auto-renewable subscription info keys
After that send your data to apple in Json format (Note that receipt part has to base 64 encoded.) and read the response carefully. In response you will find codes given in above table depending upon situation.
Please note that in real environment receipt verification should be dome from another server not from iPhone or iPad itself.
Post here if you have any further doubts.
Related
I have implemented In-App Purchase Auto-Renewable Subscription into my app but I'm not sure if I have done it correctly as the app constantly asks for iTunes login.
In the user case: I am subscribed to monthly payments and my first month is over and expect it to auto-renew.
The flow I have at the moment is as follows...
(in App Delegate) Check receipt is valid
(if receipt IS valid) check all receipts for latest expiration date
(if expired - which seems to be the case after the first month is over) call SKReceiptRefreshRequest to get latest receipts. I have put a count check on this otherwise it gets stuck in a never ending loop.
Do final check to see if latest receipt is in-fact expired.
Is this the correct way to go about this? If not could you shine some light on this?
It all seems to be working fine apart from the annoyance of iTunes login. Which I guess would only be once a month outside of the Sandbox environment which isn't too bad but just want to be sure I'm doing this correctly.
Thanks
Don't call SKReceiptRefreshRequest. This request is usually only for the "restore purchases" mechanism. This is why you're getting the sign in dialogue. StoreKit will return to you as long as you an observer to the payment queue: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skpaymentqueue/1506042-add so you should add yourself to the payment queue on app launch. Then keep that object aline to listen for changes for the entire app lifecycle. You will receive the renewals in the updatedTransactions callback https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skpaymenttransactionobserver/1506107-paymentqueue
Secondly, you should be doing receipt validation on your own server and not on the client as it will be susceptible to a MITM attack. You can also easily control the logic there and receive Server to server notifications which is best for managing subscriptions.
I have an app where I’m offering Auto Renewal Subscriptions. Here is how it currently works, when the user subscribes, it saves a Bool in UserDefaults as true, after that I can make a receipt request to see if the subscription has expired. My issue or what I don’t fully understand is the logic on how often to make that request, checking for authenticity every time the user launches the app seems like a lot, or do I need to save the expiration date in UserDefaults and just check a couple of days after the expiration date to see if the user renewed? This way we limit the requests we make to retrieve the Apple receipt.
Can someone share the logic used when checking for authenticity in an app using Auto Renewal Subscriptions?
The "right" way to do it is to manage everything server side (with some caching on the device in case the user is offline). Refreshing the receipt on the device is insecure, slow, and could make that annoying "Login with iTunes" prompt keep popping up for the user :)
It also prevents you from ever having complete analytics of your subscriber base since you can only get data points when they are active in the app.
What you would do is store the receipt file in a database after purchase, and refresh it there to keep the subscription status up-to-date. Then your app is asking your database if the user is subscribed (and caching the value in UserDefaults).
Here is a good blog post that outlines what the setup should look like: iOS Subscriptions are Hard
The idea is whether rain or shine, wet or fine, user must get that he paid for all out.
From Apple:
Store Kit provides built-in functionality to restore transactions for non-consumable products, auto-renewable subscriptions and free subscriptions
For these transactions Apple Store Kit has good build-in tools. I want to focus on other types (consumable in particular).
One and only transaction information is an identifier and a receipt data which we receiving by Store Kit after successful purchase.
Our application uses server-side model to deliver products to it. But there still much cases of losing purchase data, such as if the server lay down while user is making purchase via App Store so its not possible to send receipt to server to complete verification process.
Current workaround is:
Server returns a list of product identifiers
User selects one; app saves its identifier on device (via SQLite or Core Data). Standart Apple Store transaction process goes right after that.
In case of success application saves receipt data in conjunction with its identifier on device and send it to server. If there were failure or cancelation the identifier is immediatelly removed from device.
If server's response is OK then app removes identifier with receipt data from device. Otherwise it will send requests to server periodically until successful response behaves.
But this approach still has leaks. For example, user can remove application from device not waiting for transaction delivering to server, so there will not any proof about his purchase at all.
Your suggestions?
The fundamental rule is that you not call finishTransaction: on the payment queue until you have successfully delivered content. That means that you make the request to your verification and content servers and they come back with valid responses. Only after those proper responses do you call finishTransaction:. Note that bad purchase receipt is valid just not good. You will get people trying to ripoff goods - don't lose sleep over it but do put in proper receipt checking.
As I understand it (from my non-consumable items), as long as you do not call finishTransaction, the store will continue to retry it on your app installation. For that reason, I do not think you need your application to save the receipt on the device. However, for consumables, the server has to store the data if you want to be able to restore it later. A non-trivial problem is what key to store it under.
BTW, your first line is absolutely correct and worth losing sleep over.
Folks,
I am attempting to verify that auto-renew subscriptions are actually renewing in the sandbox environment. First, it appears that auto-renew subscriptions in sandbox are only valid for 5 minutes. Makes sense. I expect that if I wait for five minutes, then make another call to
https://sandbox.itunes.apple.com/verifyReceipt
With my receipt data, I should see the subscription renewed with an expiry date another five minutes out.
Unfortunately that is not the case. All I see is a response with latest_expired_receipt_info and a status of 21006, which means "This receipt is valid but the subscription has expired" according to the Apple docs.
Can anyone tell me if they are able to test auto-renew subscriptions end-to-end, including this renew component? Or do I have to launch this app and cross my fingers that prod will work as advertised?
Alternatively, is there some sort of client-side magic/API call I have to run prior to re-posting my data to the verifyReceipt URL?
There was some discussion on this topic here, but it's not clear to me if I can/should expect to be able to re-verify subscriptions entirely on the server side by posting to the verifyReceipt URL or if I have to do something on the client side too.
Thanks!
Copied from the Apple's Developer Forum, for those not willing to goto the forum...
Figured it out (but not thanks to the Apple docs):
1 month subscriptions auto-renew every 5 minutes. So far so good. They
auto-renew 5 times and then they stop, so after 25 minutes you'll get
the 21006 error. However even when repurchasing the same subscription
it will NOT auto-renew again on the same test account since it has
already auto-renewed 5 times. So if you want to test renewal and you
have been messing with these subscriptions for a while you need to
create a new itunes connect test user. This is very annoying honestly
and it would be a lot easier if we could just reset the entire
purchase history of a test user account. Also putting all in-app
test information in the Xcode documentation would be a lot better as
opposed to spreading it over Xcode docs/iTunes Connect doc/people
figuring stuff out themselves
Hope this helps.
This conversation in the Apple dev forums may shed some light on this issue for others who discover this post: https://devforums.apple.com/thread/105350?tstart=0
#Lata Sadhwani, App developer
For testing auto-renew subscriptions, the expiration time is 5 minutes
in sandbox (at least for the monthly subscriptions, not sure if this
is different for different periods). So when testing an auto-renew
subscription in sandbox, it should auto-renew every 5 mins and you
know they are working correctly.
But there is one problem. These subscriptions auto-renew only 5 times
(i.e. the purchase happens 6 times). After that you'll get an error
when verifying the receipt. So if you want to test after that, you
will need to test with another IAP test account (yes it is a pain
testing, especially if you have been doing this for quite some time!)
To check if a subscription has been cancelled or is valid, your
receipt verification code will need to parse the response from Apple
servers and they say you should verify each receipt. If the
subscription has expired or has been cancelled, the appropriate error
code will be returned (a non-zero status). If it has been renewed by a
user, the most current receipt is returned by the Apple servers.
Sorry for the millionth question about iTunes subscriptions, but I still have a few doubts.
Basically I'm implementing auto-renewable subscriptions in my app and I want to make sure I got it right. Here's a list of steps to take that I came up with:
whenever an user buys a subscription, send the receipt to the server to validate it
if the receipt is valid, save it on the database
on application load, ask the server if a receipt for this UDID exists (this is to figure out if the user has a valid subscription)
if so, check if a new item has been added on the store in a date range from the subscription start date to the expire date
if any, notify the user about those items in some way and mark them as freely downloadable
Are these steps correct? And if so, why does the Apple doc say:
In most cases, your iOS client application should not need to change. In fact, your client application is now made simpler, as you can use the same code to recover auto-renewable subscriptions as you do to recover nonconsumable products. This is described in “Restoring Transactions.”Your application receives a separate transaction for each period of time where the subscription was renewed; your application should verify each receipt separately.
To me it looks like this needs some code to handle all the various cases I mentioned, instead. Or I'm totally wrong about it. Am I?
Plus, how do I know about the subscription expiration date? I can't find a way to get this information anywhere. Am I supposed to save this on my own database?
Update:
I've figured out a few things since I posted this question. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
First of all I guess I'm supposed to store the length of the subscription somewhere on my own database, because as stated on Apple's docs, you cannot retrieve it in any way through Apple's web services. In fact, each subscription length has a different product identifier, so you should have a way to convert a product identifier to a subscription length.
Also, Sylvian has posted details about his implementation of auto-renewable subscriptions, so at least I know my thinking wasn't too much flawed.
Now the only problem is this: how do I know that an user has a valid subscription? I could store this information on my server, yeah, but how do I associate an user with a completed transaction? Should I save the device's UDID?
Here is how we implemented In App Purchases and specifically the new auto-renewable products at my company.
The application transmits the transaction receipt to our webservice, we return OK to the application if we handled it correctly and Apple could verify it. In that case we updated the user account (i.e. the database) to say "yes he has paid and his subscription is valid till the receipt expiration date".
After the OK for this webservice, the application reloads the account info through another webservice, and see there is a valid subscription. That was it... Until auto-renewable products appeared.
We now had to implement some CRON jobs which runs every day: every day we make a list of passes which are supposed to expire, and we ask Apple if the original receipt is still valid: the magic thing is that in their answer, there is a field latest-receipt which embeds the latest receipt. If it is not the same as the one we have, we understand that the subscription has been renewed automatically, we store the latest receipt for the next cron check, and we update the user account to extend the expiration date.
Hope it helps.
I think I found a solution. It doesn't require an additional username/password and it seems to be working.
Note: If you think this is inappropriate, please explain why in the comments. Thanks.
Basically, whenever an user buys a subscription, I validate the receipt against my server and store the receipt data in the user defaults. Then, when the app is opened, or whenever I need to check if the subscription is still valid, I retrieve the previously saved receipt data from the user defaults and validate it against the server.
My webservice just returns whether the subscription is still valid or has expired, plus some other related information such as the subscription length. To do this, it just queries the iTunes server as usual, and checks if the status response is nonzero. 21006 means that the subscription has expired.
If your app has some user management i.e. you use username/password to use the app, then you have to maintain a server to record the purchase/validity of the currently logged in user. This is applicable for normal subscription and non-consumable purchase. But... if you use the new auto-renewable subscription, then it's NOT possible to maintain multiple user in that app, because : this kind of purchase can not be done multiple times within the subscription period using the same Apple ID from the same application and I found it really annoying and finding a better solution for this case i.e where I have multiple child account in the app but I want to use the same Apple-Id to purchase a auto-renewable subscription for each account. And I think I have to use the old subscription model. Any new thoughts ?
as far as I have understand it the apple server will contact you (or the customer with his iPhone) and tell "look here I have a valid purchase for you". Inside your App you read this message and unlock the regarding content for use. The next step is to tell the apple server that you have responded to the receipt and the apple server will not show the message again.
So with a renewable subscription you get for each period a new message. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.