免费服务的免费试用期

Question

Although I searched a lot on this site and used Google as well, I cannot find a good solution for my problem. I'm creating an app that offers a paid web service as an option. I would like give away a initial period of this service and link this to the purchase date of the app.

The Daily app is doing something similar. After downloading the app, you can read The Daily for two weeks for free. After that time, you have to subscribe.

Your help would be highly appreciated!

Answer 1

From Apple's developer guidelines :

Apps using IAP to purchase physical goods or goods and services used outside of the application will be rejected

If your premium web service is at all useable outside the app itself, in-app-purchase won't be a solution, so you'll have to implement the logic on your server, based on user names, etc.

If, however, it's simply a web service that iOS accesses—think if Instagram offered a paid upgrade in the days before their Android app—then you could use IAP subscriptions to do the trick. Again, from Apple's documentation :

• Auto-renewable subscriptions are delivered to all of a user's devices in the same way as non-consumable products. However, auto-renewable subscriptions differ in other ways. When you create an auto-renewable subscription in iTunes Connect, you choose the duration of the subscription. The App Store automatically renews the subscription each time its term expires. If the user chooses to not allow the subscription to be renewed, the user's access to the subscription is revoked after the subscription expires. Your application is responsible for validating whether a subscription is currently active and can also receive an updated receipt for the most recent transaction.

As a side note, it looks like Apple are about to implement free trials, but haven't quite done it yet (there are some interesting hints in some of the documentation, but there's not an option when creating an IAP subscription yet).

I suggest you put some UI in that invites users to subscribe to the free service, and save that YES/NO answer along with the [NSDate date] in a defaults variable synced to iCloud . This means that it will be tied to their Apple ID, and can't easily be deleted by removing the app—next time they install it, you can restore that preference key.

Then, once the trial period is up, bring up your custom UI (since all the IAP UI is custom!) that gives people the chance to subscribe to an ongoing service using the auto-renewable subscription.