OK so have a problem with the whole in-app purchase review process and hope someone can shed some light/experience on it.
We have a project which is a magazine for the ipad. Each issue requires an in-app purchase before it is downloaded. The issues are served from an XML feed when a new one is published.
The problem is, how can we have Apple review an in-app purchase without displaying the new issue. They wont be able to see it in the live binary. If we publish the issue we have to say "unavailable", which looks extremely unprofessional to the customer, until the in-app purchase is reviewed.
We dont want to have to publish a new binary each time a new issue is published as thats a pointless exercise for the customer
Thanks, any suggestions apart from change message to "coming soon" would be apprciated. The only other thought we had is a flag in the app settings which displays "unavailable issues"
If you login to your iOS developer account, you'll find this Getting Started with in App Purchase pdf file, which has information that you'll need in your setting up with your iAP item.
Specifically, I think what you need is an item belongs to the category named Subscriptions. This should solve your problem.
You can use consumable purchases, i.e. right to download 1 article. 5 purchases - 5 articles.
Or, give a user subscription for month or so.
You could always just keep some kind of "sample" issue available for the purposes of the user demoing the software.
That, or a few select pages from the active issue could be specified as "demo pages", as in they would be viewable from a demo version of the software.
Related
I got my application approved on app store.
But due to some change in the feed I am using my app is crashing now. What am I supposed to do now?
Giving an update will take 7 days for apple to approve and I will get bad reviews if any one downloads it in between.
What am I supposed to do now?
You could:
Fix the feed.
Remove the app from sale until you fixed the bug and the update is approved.
Remove the app from sale until you fixed the bug and the update is approved and request a speedy review.
To remove a App from sale, go to the Rights and Pricing of that app in iTunnesConnect and set the Availability Date in the future. this will remove the app from sale. Just put the date back to now to make it available again.
You can ask for an expedited review (http://developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/appreviewteam/), if you haven't abused of it yet and have real reasons (as it seems) to ask for it, they will review your App in between 1 and 3 days... :)
If you want to stop selling your App while it is happening, you can go to the Pricing menu in iTunes Connect and remove all the countries available...
You need to submit an expedited review request. From my personal experience I've generally pushed these out within 24 hours. Usually Apple does these as a one time exception, and is supposed to be used once in a great while. I've done 4 total in 2 years. Anyhow, since there is contact information on the website, if users download and contact you reply back that there are pending updates, and will be out shortly.
You could go through pausing delivery of app until ready, etc, etc. Availability can be changed and automated via dates. You can remove from countries available.
Here is link for expedited review. You'll need your App ID and Name, etc.
http://developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/appreviewteam/
I have been stuck in a strange situation, according to my requirement, I need to track the resellers of my app, i.e. I will be publishing link of my app in the iTunes-Store on 3 or more different sites(The re seller's sites).
According to my promise which I made to these resellers, I will provide a share of my profit.
So here I have to track from which link did the user came to the APP-Store.
Any suggestions or solutions will be Thankful.
I think the only way to do it will be server-side. Links at your resellers should point to your server, where you log the source of link (resellers web page) and redirect request to AppStore. But you'll have no way of knowing, which of this requests ended up with a purchase.
The only way to do this for real is to get them to become iTunes affiliates and provide reports back to you. They should use the iTunes referral to make the sale (they will get a small cut from Apple) -- Apple will report that back to them, and then they can prove to you that they made a sale, and then you pay based on that.
Reserve the right to audit them -- meaning that they will have to show you the report directly from the iTunes affiliate site.
I assume that iTunes actually tells them what they sold, but you would need to check that.
Another idea (which may or may not make sense based on what your app does) is to make personalized versions of your app for each reseller. If there's some way to incorporate a very simple feature that is personalized (and makes sense), then you can upload the same app multiple times and assume all sales are coming from that reseller.
So, for example, if the app were an exercise tracker, and the resellers were gyms -- you could customize the app for each gym and add their schedule and contact info to it. Then, sell the app as an Excerise Tracker for XYZ Gym and let them promote it and get a cut of sales.
I uploaded one of my app before couple of weeks and it is available on the App store now. It has 2 In- app purchase. In app purchase logic is totally from remote server as we wanted to add new pack without updating binary file so we did everything on server side.
So, here is my actual question. Now I want to add new pack. so here is my confusion/question.
I made on inventory.xml file for all the In app purchase id for validating in app id. and I am displaying only those Items which are valid from App store.
Also, when user purchase any pack I am downloading contents from the server and they will have new pack after successful purchase.
So, how do I make it available to Apple for submission purposes without also making it available to the general public? That is, if I add the new pack to the inventory.xml file which lists all the packs, everyone will be able to see it before Apple even approves it. But if I don't add the new pack to inventory.xml, then Apple will have nothing to look at in order to approve it.
Thanks in Advance.
When you submit new in-app purchases to Apple, you upload screenshots and descriptions of the new content to iTunes Connect. That should be all they need for review, and you can wait to update your inventory.xml file until they have approved the new content.
I found answer for this question from other sources. So I am posting it here what I have found and I believe that is the correct answer. This is my opinion it may be wrong..
So, in my situation I can add new item in my inventory.xml file as well as in iTunes account and put it new item for the review.
The reason why General public (users) will not see my new pack because I have only show valid products which I got from SKProductResponse. So in the review process it will not be valid product and it would not show in the list of available items to the users.
Now, We and Apple tester can see it because we both are using In-app test user account to test new items and I believe In-app test user account returns all the product as valid.
So, from this flow I decided to move forward with this and hopefully it should work.
I am developing an application in which user can purchase any image he likes. For this i have implemented the in app purchase functionality as consumable products. That means if user purchase the same image again, he has to pay for that again. But apple rejected this application by saying that the product should be non-consumable in this case.
Now the problem is i have to create unique product id for every image and the number of images are around 1800. So, do i need to make the 1800 ids in the itunesconnect?
Also, there is a parameter in itunesconnect that:
For Review
When you have tested your in app purchase and are ready to approve it and submit it for review, upload a screenshot below. This is for review purposes only and will not be displayed in the Store.
For this do i need to add screen shot by testing each and every image?
Please provide any simple solution for the problem.
Thank s in advance...
If you have 1800 unique products, you will need 1800 entries in the store.
There isn't an automated means for uploading product information so you will have to do it all by hand.
Note that you maybe also come away with a generic image IAP object, that's consumable. But you have to provide additional server infrastructure to make sure a account can be created and purchases can be restored.
And even then, it seems to be a thin line. There are however apps in the store that work this way.
Update (Feb 2012): It's not working anymore. Apple rejected the latest app using this technique. I'm sorry.
I am considering using In App Purchase for our iPhone app. But since we will offer a larger quantity of content items (>10 video items each day added), I would like to automate the new product registration in iTunes Connect.
Is this possible ?
If not: how long does it typically take before Apple approves a new registred product in iTunes Connect ? Since the content looses quickly it's 'freshness' (news broadcasts...), it is crucial to be able to have new content available ASAP.
Would you recommend using In App Purchase for this scenario or would you recommend developing our own payment & account system ?
As far as I know, it is not possible to automate it, unless you develop your own script (in AppleScript, for example, to operate safari and I am not sure if it will work as expected.
A new app will be reviewed and approved typically in 7 days. In-app purchases will go live when the app is approved.
In-app purchases can operate in two ways:
you include the content inside the app
you put the content on your severs and include the mechanisms to make the magic work. When the user buy the app, Apple server will communicate with yours and vice-versa, and a signal must be sent to Apple servers, during the process, so they will know the content was delivered. You will have to read the docs, as this is too complex to explain here.
I automated the input of a large number of in-app purchases using the Firefox extension iMacros. The free version is absolutely sufficient for this.
You have to create a CSV file containing all the data, then record the workflow in iTunes Connect and press start!