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We are looking at using consumable (non-renewable) IAP for subscriptions for our app after being rejected for auto-renewable subscriptions. I've read through many posts pertaining to this, but haven't seen any discussion on limiting the number of iOS devices a user can use the consumable on or "restore" to.

The main concept seems to be, let user create an account (optionally) on your server, and allow them to enter account info to restore/share across multiple devices.

My primary question is, how can we limit the number of devices a user is allowed to use the subscription on, and the number of devices a user is allowed to "restore" to, and still meet Apple's requirements for restoring purchases?

If we setup a server, and allow the user to optionally create an account to store the receipt information, how can we keep that user from sharing their login information with anyone if we have no way to uniquely track the number of unique devices that are using the account? (perhaps I'm wrong here, but with the deprecation of UUID and the possibility of identifierForAdvertising changing if the app is deleted and re-installed, there is no way to cache a unique device to determine how many devices have used the subscription, correct?)

I've contemplated storing an auth token in the user's iCloud, but from my understanding, there is no upper limit on how many devices can share an iCloud account.

I'm sure I'm not the first to run into this problem, how is everyone solving this?

Thanks - Matt

matt
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1 Answers1

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Consumable items are intended to be device-sepcific. And once consumed, the user must purchase it again, even if it were purchased previously on the given device.

Apple doesn't officially want you to limit the number of devices for subscriptions or non-consumables - they want your IAP subscriptions and non-consumables to be available on ALL of a user's devices. See: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StoreKitGuide/APIOverview/OverviewoftheStoreKitAPI.html

Why not use iCloud to transfer an IAP non-renewable-subscription between devices? That limits it to just the user's device set. Why do you care if they have 2 devices or 10? I bet that users don't typically share their apple-id's outside of their immediate family.

TomSwift
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