In-App Purchase Programming Guide - Apple Developer

Working with Subscriptions
Apps that use subscriptions have some additional behaviors and considerations. Because subscriptions
incorporate an element of time, your app needs to have the appropriate logic to determine whether the
subscription is currently active and what time periods the subscription was active in the past. Your app also
needs to react to new and renewed subscriptions, and properly handle expired subscriptions. Figure 5-1 shows
an example subscription timeline, including some of the complexities your app needs to handle.
Figure 5-1
Example subscription timeline
Calculating a Subscription’s Active Period
Your app needs to determine what content the user has access to based on the period of time the subscription
was active. Consider, for example, a magazine that publishes a new issue on the first day of each month,
following the timeline in Figure 5-1.
On February 20, the user buys a one-month subscription. When the user buys the subscription, the issue that
was published February 1 is delivered immediately. On March 20, the subscription is due to expire but
automatically renews for another month. On April 20, the user chooses to let the subscription lapse. Finally,
on May 17, the user resubscribes. At that time, the May issue is delivered immediately just as the February
issue was for the original subscription.
A total of three issues are available to the user at the end of this example—February, March, and May—as
shown in Table 5-1.
Table 5-1
Timeline of a sample subscription
Magazine issue
January
February
User has access to content?
No, subscription hasn’t started
Yes, delivered when the user subscribed on February 20
2013-10-22 | Copyright © 2013 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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