The limited world of iOS's auto-renewable subscriptions
marco.org
marco.org
That's nice. I worked on a auto-renewing service app, and I received a rejection phone call from Apple too. They didn't tell me anything useful, they just said that "your kind of app isn't appropriate for this type of in-app purchase". When I pressed for details and talked about alternative options, the person at Apple admitted to me that she'd never actually used our app!
I can't get over how terrible Apple are at communicating with developers. It's bad enough that there are these unwritten rules, but having to deal with Chinese whispers internal to Apple as well is ridiculous.
Did Marco forgot about this, or did he decide to try and slip it through anyway?
[1]http://www.marco.org/2011/02/22/subscription-rule-not-for-sa...
Since we didn't want to confuse our customers by giving them no information on how to subscribe, and the app store is a valuable marketing channel, we decided to implement auto-renewable IAP subscriptions per Apple's recommendation and documentation but got rejected for having the wrong purchasability type. We then had to go implement non-renewable subscriptions (which are more complicated and provide a worse user experience, in my opinion) and got approved for sale.
One of our developers filed a bug report with Apple about the documentation regarding purchasability types and received a response that they would improve it. I guess I'm fine with sharing revenue with Apple if they make it really easy for users to subscribe (which IAP certainly does), but it'd be nice to understand the Right Way from the beginning.
Did they ask you to remove the ability to let users subscribe from the website, or did they let that stay after you built IAP.
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.
Your In-App Purchase is currently an Auto-Renewable Subscription. However, it would be more appropriate to use the Non-Renewing Subscription In-App Purchase type. Auto-Renewable Subscriptions are intended for periodical apps, such as magazines and newspapers. Non-Renewing Subscriptions should be used for products that are not appropriate for Auto-Renewable Subscriptions.
Nothing in Apple's documentation hints that Auto-Renewable Subscriptions are more appropriate for one class of app than for another, so I was hoping that my reviewer was acting on some subjective, high-level guideline that I could argue on. However, it's beginning to look as if there is a specific, unwritten policy against non-periodical apps.
> 11.9 Apps containing "rental" content or services that expire after a limited time will be rejected
It seems that Apple's review team has interpreted SaaS to fall under this guideline.
Up to Apple to make the judgement call, but the line gets grey with something like TheStreet.com, which has a lot of services, and also a newsletter.
You'd have to go to the trouble of building the functionality and submitting it to Apple to find out though, and you'd be running the risk of Apple changing their mind at any time.
My suspicion is that they want to prevent app authors from using a SaaS-like monthly billing model. Whether this is due to customer confusion or their own distaste for monthly billing I can't figure.
A lot of Apple's thinking can be explained through the eyes of the user. As a user I'd hate for apps to continually bill me unless I expect it (which I would in case of a publication). As a Developer, I can see where SaaS billing would make sense and would like to have that option.
Evernote, Dropbox, they seems to be forced to use non auto-renewable-subscriptions.
But, Greplin is using auto-renewable-subscriptions on their iPhone app. I don't know why they can use it when other SaaS apps are rejected.