Can someone provide concrete info on how the app upgrade process works on iOS as far as the developer is concerned? I’ve been rummaging through Stackoverflow only to find hand-waving explanations and no links to official documentation. Google search results only led to Cisco’s IOS and the end-user upgrade process. I’d like to know the following:
- How does the App Store know when you’ve provided a new version? Do I have to implement something in my app, which the App Store pings? Or do I set things up stuff through the Apple Developer website? I’ve been waiting 2 months for developer approval and have no idea what’s going on behind those doors because I get access-denied messages when trying to read official articles.
- Is there any Objective-C code I need to write for an upgrade to be possible? Any plist I need to edit?
- How is payment affected when version 1 of the app is free, then version 2 is paid or version 1 is paid and version 2 changes its price.
- Does Apple allow me to do forced upgrades? All the answers on Stackoverflow have been, “I think this is bad business logic” or “I think Apple forbids this, but I don’t have the official documentation to prove it.” At a certain point, very old versions will be too time consuming to support. You don’t see Microsoft still supporting Windows 95, do you?
You just submit the new version to Apple. When it’s approved, it will appear in the App Store.
Same as above, Apple pretty much does it all for you.
If you transition from free to paid, everyone that has downloaded the app for free will not have to pay to upgrade to the paid version.
IIRC you cannot force users to upgrade, but you can display a notification within the app to alert users that an update is available. To implement this, I would just have the app request a file on your server that tells the app what the current version number is. You do not need to support users on old version, if they have problems with an old version, it’s fine to tell them to upgrade.