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I am creating an note taking app like Evernote for iPad. I decided to provide some In App Purchase plans for 2 reasons.

  1. Unlock more features in app.
  2. Should be Auto renewable after specified time period.

Now i have confusion which type of In App Purchase to select for this. I am interested in Auto-Renewable Subscriptions

After visiting the guidlines here, i found

You may sell and unlock additional functionality within your application using In-App Purchase. Adding additional functionality to an app should generally be considered Non-Consumable.

But Non-consumable are not Auto-Renewable.

So which type of product should i choose?

Does Apple approve unlocking app features with Auto-Renewable Subscriptions?

Also, after purchasing a plan, on how many devices user can unlock(restore) features with same Apple ID?

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1 Answers1

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Beware of using Auto-Renewable subscription becuase Auto-Renewable subscription's world is very small. 99% of the apps gets rejected in this case. Basically apple allows Auto-Renewable subscription for apps those follows:

  • Newspaper, Magazine
  • News Stand
  • audio/video streaming feeds
  • membership to a dating service
  • Business app providing cloud storage services

you can read a well defined document (page 4) by apple here:

https://developer.apple.com/in-app-purchase/In-App-Purchase-Guidelines.pdf

A application of mine got rejected with these comments by apple:

We found that the Purchasability Type for one or more of your In-App Purchase products was inappropriately set, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.

Cloud-books is set to Auto-Renew Subscription.

Based on product functionality, it would be more appropriate to use the non-renewing subscription In-App Purchase type. The Auto-Renewable Subscription product is best suited for apps that require or feature dynamically or frequently changing content, such as digital periodicals or radio subscriptions.

Non-renewing subscriptions can still be offered, but auto-renewable subscriptions are now preferred for the following reasons

I have submitted app today with non-auto subs and see now they approves it or not, otherwise finally I would have to make if consumable with some server mechanism of forcing user to buy it again after a certain time period.

Go through this thread, might me useful for you:

iOS recurring subscription policy for service, not content

and read this article also:

http://www.marco.org/2012/01/06/autorenewable-subscription-restrictions

UPDATE: My another app on auto-renewable subscription got approved by apple. Before approval it got 2 rejections. First for insufficient content in IAP Product identifiers and second for insufficient application description.

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Vaibhav Saran
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    @Vaibhav, thanks for reply. So you mean there is no way to Auto-renew purchases? So what is your suggestion according to my situation. Should i implement consumable products, with my server side restriction on content time period. Or i should implement non-auto subscriptions? Which is better in both? – Khawar Jan 23 '14 at 11:43
  • they should approve `non-auto renewable` i think but I myself not sure about this until my submission gets some response from them. – Vaibhav Saran Jan 23 '14 at 12:15
  • @VaibhavSaran, i have seen Evernote is using Auto-renewable subscription, and it is working perfectly. So if my app approves too with Auto-renew subscription, i don't want my user to purchase subscription once and unlock it on many devices, unless he is logged in with same Application's email/password. Would Apple allow me to restrict user purchases on basis of my own web server's assigned IDs? – Khawar Jan 23 '14 at 13:33
  • you mean to say to restrict multiple login at same time? Yes you can do this. – Vaibhav Saran Jan 24 '14 at 05:04