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I have a magazine app, and I want to provide users a one year auto-renewable subscription, and for non-subscribed users, they can use non-consumable IAPs to pay for each issue and then download it. What is the best way to implement it?

For auto-renewable subscription I don't think it's a problem. I can follow the tutorial at http://www.viggiosoft.com/blog/blog/2011/10/29/at-newsstand-and-subscriptions/ to finish this part. But for the non-consumable IAP part, I'm not sure. Do I need to add all the non-consumable IAPs for future issues before I submit the app? If I do this, how could Apple review my IAPs, because the future issues are not prepared at the reviewing time. Or, can I add non-consumable IAPs after my app is published to the App store? For example, every time when a new issue is ready in our server, we add a new non-soncumable IAP in iTC, and also set the product id to the issue in the server. When the non-subscribed user click that issue, the purchase for the specified product id will start. Is it possible?

Yang
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After some research I found that the best way to implement it is to set up a new non-consumable IAP at each time when you want to publish a new issue.

The only problem is that, each IAP needs to be submitted for review, and before it is approved, the users who try to buy the issue will get an error message: "Cannot connect to the iTunes store". I haven't figured out how to know that the IAP is in review, so I can popup a nicer message like "Issue is review, please wait" other than a confusing error message.

Yang
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I have a magazine app, and I want to provide users a one year auto-renewable subscription, and for non-subscribed users, they can use non-consumable IAPs to pay for each issue and then download it. What is the best way to implement it?

You should accept your solution, but here is another case, maybe it helps you or others:

The subscribers can have they magazines, which are not in at iTunes Server, but at your hosting. Those magazines not need to bypass the apple review.

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It depends whether you want a user to be able to permanently have a record stored in their app receipt of the issues they have bought. You might want this, if you want a user to be able to delete the app, with all associated content, then later re-install the app, and be able to download the specific back issues they purchased previously—all without having any user account on your own server. The use of a non-consumable in-app purchase also enables you to give them access to these issues across multiple devices that are signed in to that Apple ID, again without having to run your own user account-server combination to track purchased issues.

If these features don't matter to you, then there is a solution you could consider that is much simpler where you don't have to keep creating new in-app purchase products. Have a consumable in-app purchase product that is called something like Purchase One Issue. When a person buys this product, they get one credit and they can use this to select the issue they wish to be given access to. Your app then gives them access to that issue. You could also of course reverse this process in the UX: they pick the issue, click buy, you send them into the purchase process for the Purchase One Issue product, and you automatically give them access to the selected issue since they already selected it.

Note: consumable in-app purchases are not stored in the app receipt, so a user couldn't use this approach to 'restore previous purchases'. In scenarios where this is acceptable however, this is a much less labour intensive approach once set up.

Duncan Babbage
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