Question

I have got StoreKit to work for auto-renewable subscriptions and can successfully buy and renew subscriptions via the Sandbox. So far, so good.

The problem I am having is that the expiry date being returned by apple seems in-correct.

When first purchasing the subscription, it gives you a receipt response. In this response it gives you expires_date_formatted, this is obtained by querying the receipt or latest_receipt_info part of the response back from apple.

When the subscription has expired, you will get a latest_expired_receipt_info response (this does not appear in regular purchases and only when the receipt has expired).

For whatever reason, the latest_expired_receipt_info has a different date stored inside expires_date_formatted, and its causing me all sorts of headaches.

Usually my app will report that the subscription has expired but when you try to repurchase a subscription, it will say that the subscription is still active.

This seems to imply that the date inside latest_expired_receipt_info is accurate, but there appears to be no way to get that date (unless you intentionally let the subscription expire).

Examples:

receipt (stored) = {
    bid = "myappid.goeshere";
    bvrs = "1.0";
    "expires_date" = 1321365095905;
    "expires_date_formatted" = "2011-11-15 13:51:35 Etc/GMT";
    ...other stuff....
}
latest_expired_receipt_info = {
    bid = "myappid.goeshere";
    bvrs = "1.0";
    "expires_date" = 1321366860000;
    "expires_date_formatted" = "2011-11-15 14:21:00 Etc/GMT";
    ...other stuff...
}

In the above example, we can see that the expires_date_formatted is totally different, one says 13:51, the other says 14:21

In other tests the difference can be anything from a few minutes to ten or twenty minutes.

How do I get the correct expires_date_formatted?

Answer 1

You are testing in sandbox mode and not in production mode.

In this case subscriptions are much shorter: 7-day subscriptions are only 5 minutes and 1-year subscriptions expire after an hour.