Question on the background: did Apple announce this change long in advance and this start enforcing it (as advised) after the window for remediation elapsed? Or was it sudden?
A sudden change is just bad form if that was the case.
A sudden change is just bad form if that was the case.
Here is the sequence of events for our company:
2012-ish: apple requires IAP be an option if you have payment subscriptions. This date might be slightly off, I think it was way back then.
2014-ish: We launch an app that has no recurring subs. So we are still in compliance with their terms.
2017: We add a concept of membership, with braintree managing the subscriptions. Unbeknownst to us, we are now in violation of their terms.
2019: Apple notices the subs, and freezes our app updates
So we were indeed in violation of their terms, ones they had made known long before. We did not know it, but we were. Apple let us know 2 years after the fact by preventing us from publishing a bug fix release.
I heard about this change about a month ago on a couple of news platforms. Specifically, I heard that Apple would be requiring apps which have out-of-app purchasing mechanisms to offer the same products via in-app purchasing.
Also, this is a remediation period. Existing apps aren't being taken down (short of repeated version update submissions which don't comply with the new rules), the new updates are simply being held to the new standard.