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It's honestly a breath of fresh air. I wish Apple made it easier for developers to adopt this business model instead of having to choose between an unsustainabl

It's honestly a breath of fresh air. I wish Apple made it easier for developers to adopt this business model instead of having to choose between an unsustainable one-time purchase and an unpalatable rent-forever subscription. I wonder how much work went into building the framework to enable a "subscription to new features" on iOS. Perhaps it's even something the developer might be interested in open-sourcing so more developers can go this route?

rhizome 5y ago
I don't know how the purchasing gets set up, but couldn't all of these just be separate products? 7-day trial, permanent version license, upgrades for two years...all with different prices? Does Apple prevent you from applying more than one to a single app or something?
- TheJoeMan 5y ago
  Because the 12 months are from purchase date not development cycle, so you’d have to track features available to each user.
interpol_p 5y ago
It's ridiculously hard to adopt this model on iOS I started implementing it for my app, Codea (https://codea.io https://codea.io) because it was released in 2011 and I have been updating it ever since. So I'm still working pretty hard to support customers who purchased it for $8 over ten years ago! I got as far as enumerating features (classing them as "Free" and "Pro"), adding a system to the codebase to check if a feature has been permanently activated based on the most recent receipt. But then I went to implement NON-autorenewing subscriptions — i.e., subscriptions that don't renew automatically — and discovered that Apple doesn't even support StoreKit testing for this type of subscription. So it would be a nightmare to test with having to manually create a ton of non-reusable sandbox accounts for every scenario It's unsupported, under documented and just neglected. You have to work harder NOT to automatically take your customers' money after each renewal period! I'd still like to go this route, but it took weeks away from working on actual useful features. And since it's a hobby project it seemed sensible to shelve it for now Edit: the worst part is you have to litter your codebase with checks for features and whether they are active. Gracefully handle them not being active. If Apple let us simply sell version upgrades this would all go away

rhizome 5y ago

I don't know how the purchasing gets set up, but couldn't all of these just be separate products? 7-day trial, permanent version license, upgrades for two years...all with different prices? Does Apple prevent you from applying more than one to a single app or something?

TheJoeMan 5y ago
Because the 12 months are from purchase date not development cycle, so you’d have to track features available to each user.

interpol_p 5y ago

It's ridiculously hard to adopt this model on iOS I started implementing it for my app, Codea (https://codea.io https://codea.io) because it was released in 2011 and I have been updating it ever since. So I'm still working pretty hard to support customers who purchased it for $8 over ten years ago! I got as far as enumerating features (classing them as "Free" and "Pro"), adding a system to the codebase to check if a feature has been permanently activated based on the most recent receipt. But then I went to implement NON-autorenewing subscriptions — i.e., subscriptions that don't renew automatically — and discovered that Apple doesn't even support StoreKit testing for this type of subscription. So it would be a nightmare to test with having to manually create a ton of non-reusable sandbox accounts for every scenario It's unsupported, under documented and just neglected. You have to work harder NOT to automatically take your customers' money after each renewal period! I'd still like to go this route, but it took weeks away from working on actual useful features. And since it's a hobby project it seemed sensible to shelve it for now Edit: the worst part is you have to litter your codebase with checks for features and whether they are active. Gracefully handle them not being active. If Apple let us simply sell version upgrades this would all go away