What expiry date should I see for in-app purchase in the application sandbox? [closed]

Question

Let's say a user purchases one product in my app on 11-01-2012 at 10:30 AM. What will be the expiry date for a one month duration product?

Does this depend on the time at which they purchased the product, or only the date?

I am asking because, for one month subscriptions, I am seeing 5 min expiry dates in my application running within the in-app purchasing sandbox.

Answer 1

You know, I don't think this should be closed. It's actually a pretty good question, and a fact about the sandbox that is not well known (which might be why people have voted it down!).

When testing in the sandbox, time is sped up for subscriptions. This is not as well documented as it should be. Apple do this so you can better test your renewable subscription logic. So your one month subscription will, when bought in the sandbox expire in five minutes.

It is somewhat annoying that this isn't documented anywhere in the developer documentation - only in the iTunes Connect documentation. For convenience I've posted the actual 'real world' to sandbox times below:

• 1 week = 3 minutes
• 1 month = 5 minutes
• 2 months = 10 minutes
• 3 months = 15 minutes
• 6 months = 30 minutes
• 1 year = 1 hour