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We offer an auto-renewable in-app purchase subscription in our iOS app. We want to add a free trial period to our subscription now, which already works fine. In our app's "store view", we display the product info along with a button "Test now for free".

However, if a user subscribes, enjoys a nice free month, (maybe pays for some more) and then cancels, she will be able to see our "store view" again. Now Apple makes sure that the same App Store user does not get a free trial again, which is a good thing. But that's why we also don't want to ask the user to "Test now for free", but rather "Subscribe now" in this case.

So my question is: Is there are way to tell (before the user actually purchases), if he is still eligible for a free trial?

We could just check in our own user DB if a user already subscribed before, but when she registers again with our app, she will still see "Test now for free", but would not be able to, because of her App Store account that already used up the free trial period.

Flo
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1 Answers1

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Two options to change the string you are displaying in the store view.

1) Server call to check if they have subscribed before. You say you already have this value so you could add it to your user schema if flexible i.e. hasSubscribed then you'll have it on the user object in the client and can do a check to see whether to display "test" or "subscribe" or just pull it across at launch and store it in memory for when you display the store view.

2) If you have the receipt on the client then check to see if that particular subscription has been purchased before.

jeh
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    Thanks for your answer! We already implemented your first proposal, and it should work fine for most cases. However, there's still the corner case that a user registers a second time with our service (reasons might be fraud or confusion), we will show "test" as we don't know her yet, but she actually can't test anymore because her Apple account was already used for a trial before. However, I'll look into your option 2), maybe this could act as another safety mechanism. It would be great though, if there would be a StoreKit API call to simply get this info... – Flo Nov 08 '16 at 08:47
  • There's a field in the receipt response "is_trial_period":"false" that seems to correlate with what you are looking for. If you have a link between the receipt and the user just look to see if one of objects in the in_app array has this field set to true. It might be undocumented so tread carefully. – jeh Feb 02 '17 at 13:39