iPhone InApp Purchase Automatic renewal is not working

Question

Could it be that Auto-renewal subscription is not supported in all the countries?

When I create a test user from Israel, I receive a message in the application that "Subscriptions not supported. Automatically renewing subscriptions are not supported in your storefront at this time"

But when I run the same application code and use another test user defined in another country it works fine.

Is there a list of countries for which auto-renewal subscription is supported or in opposite the countries were it is not supported.

Answer 1

Here is (possibly) the real reason:

As of January 1st 2009, Israeli law does not permit automatic renewal of subscriptions without explicit notification and consent of the subscriber.

Here is a link (Hebrew) to an article explaining the law. I strongly believe Apple took the easy part of just blocking the service instead of enabling notifications. I totally agree that this is outrageous, since, as an Israeli citizen I cannot subscribe to quite a few electronic publications. I am not familiar with the proper APIs, but I'm sure there is a way to allow manual renewal and I am also sure Apple will block that as well.

Regards, Misha