Free In-App Purchases

Question

I'm struggling with this. My client wants to set a price tag (£1.49) for the app and the app itself has 4 non-consumable in-app purchases as well (£1.49 each). However, they want to give one of the non-consumable free on the first run (but not a specific one, they want the user to choose from one of those 4) because they have paid for the application.

Is there any way to manage this? As far as I know, we cannot create free non-consumable product in iTunes connect. We can check if that's the first time user and unlock the product programmatically, but since this won't be through iTunes Connect, the users won't be able to carry their unlocked feature to other devices..

If we happen to use our own server and database to track who unlocked which as free, then I think the app more likely to be rejected.

One solution might be to make the app free and keep the non-consumables as same, but client is not keen on that solution.

Can you please advise?

Thanks Oz

Answer 1

Unfortunately, that won't work.

At least not using the appstore itself. You might be able to offer a way to download / access the same content though by implementing a seperate infrastructure which manages free download eligibility. For example, the app, upon the first launch, might check with your server if the device it is running on has been registered already. If not, it registers itself with your server and grants the user free access to one of the products.

After using up the free product, purchases are processed through IAP as usual. You would need to take care however that the user may not accidentially purchase a product again after it has been downloaded for free, and that re-installing the app won't give the same user another free download.

This way would require considerably more work and you'd loose the safety of Apples IAP structure.