Question

I have a few questions that will help me understand things better if answered:

1. Is there a way to differentiate between a fresh subscription and the renewal of a previously-purchased one?

2. Does the subscription go through the renewal process immediately after the expires_date is hit? It seems that sometimes (in the Sandbox, at least) my subscriptions will renew 30-60 seconds before the expires_date.

3. Does the renewal always happen at a consistent time after the expires_date is hit? For instance, if I launch my app and expires_date has been passed, when will the renewal occur (assuming the user didn’t cancel)? Or rather, when will my app know that the renewal has occurred on Apple’s end?

4. Scenario: app is launched and expires_date has passed for one of my subscriptions. Should I send a receipt to Apple to see if that subscription was renewed, or should I wait a couple seconds to see if the renewal process occurs?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I will attempt to answer my own question:

1. To do this, I store expires_date of the subscription in NSUserDefaults once the initial purchase is completed. When the subscription expires, I remove the object from NSUserDefaults. This allows me to determine if any subsequent subscriptions are a renewal (expires_date exists in NSUserDefaults – update with new expires_date upon renewal completion) or a fresh purchase (expires_date does not exist, either because it was removed upon a previous subscription expiration or the product has never been purchased).

2. This question is irrelevant – what I do is compare expires_date stored in NSUserDefaults to current_date every time the app enters the foreground. If current_date has passed expires_date, I call my server to verify the receipt with Apple. Apple returns the status of the subscription to my server (0 means the subscription is valid, 21006 means it has expired, and all others are trivial as far as my app is concerned) and the server forwards it to my app. In this manner, it doesn’t matter how long it takes my app to be alerted of a renewal (aka the subscription has already technically renewed through Apple but my app doesn’t yet know) because I know for certain whether the subscription has expired or not.

3. In the sandbox, renewals seem to be very untrustworthy. Sometimes my subscriptions will renew five or six times (the standard, according to Apple), sometimes once, and sometimes not at all. For the record, the 7 day subscriptions don’t renew a lot more often than the 30 day subscriptions. It would be nice to have the same reliability in the sandbox as we do in the live servers so I can write code accordingly (and stress less), but I digress. The only sure-fire and consistent way I’ve discovered to make the subscriptions alert my app that they’ve renewed is when expires_date has passed && I force close/relaunch my app. Sometimes toggling between background and foreground states works, but in my experience this is much less reliable – I have a feeling that this would work [better] in the live servers though.

4. What I do is check with my server (which in turn checks with Apple) when I notice that expires_date has passed. So it doesn’t matter if the renew occurs before/after/never, because my server tells me for certain the status of the subscription.

I hope this information helps others who have the same questions I did!