Medical Training App - How to provide paid and free version of full iphone/ipad app

Question

I am about to develop an app which should be provided free to registered doctors and medical students but paid for by anyone else.

It would be possible to provide a base app for free with limited content and then provide the remaining content as an in app purchase for paid users.

I am considering that I could set up a server holding device id's for eligible free recipients, which I would make a REST/WebService call to unlock content if eligible. Any idea if Apple would allow me to unlock the content for free users in this way?

Is there any other obvious way to achieve this split? Your feedback is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Yes, AFAIK you are allowed to give access to premium features of your app that are available as an In App puchase, as long as you don't charge for it.

For instance, the german Computerbild magazine includes unique unlock codes on its print version that allows the readers to unlock premium features in free apps. These free apps are usually your free/lite versions, but updated with a dialog where you can enter these promotional codes to unlock the premium features. These codes are validated against Computerbild's own servers. We recently updated one of our free games for this magazine, had no problems having it approved by Apple whatsoever.

In your case I'd implement a similar thing, giving away unlock codes to registered doctors and students and checking those online the first time they're used. You also may want to limit how many times each code can be used, or perhaps allow each code to be tied to a single device at any particular moment.