I have been reading about DTO (Data transfer object ) since few days. I understood concept that drives it. The concept is to make the domain object decoupled from external APIs or storage objects, by having datasource model. Certainly this will ensure a good separation of concern and make the program somewhat secure from the future change in the data model. But is that the only reason for using it? I see it adds a lot of extra code for something which may happen in future. Has anyone ever used DTOs in there iOS project and have it benefited them? Thanks in advance

I just started getting emails from people saying that family sharing is no longer working for my paid app. I went to App Store Connect where that check-box is supposed to be to allow family sharing and now it's gone. Additionally, there is no documentation about family sharing for paid apps anymore... just for in app purchases and subscriptions. I'm wondering if it's just my account or if its everyone? Being that there is no documentation anymore it seems like it would be everyone. Between removing Top Paid app charts (or putting them at the bottom of the apps tab), removing family sharing, and not being able to offer any of the marketing tools available for subscriptions or in-app purchases that Apple is trying to phase out paid apps completely. Looks like its time to change the business model...

Aloha! I would like to offer my app to the public for individual sales on the Apple App Store as well as to organizations to purchase for their students/employees (bulk or volume sale). Any recommendations on how to best accomplish this? Thank you very much for your time and consideration

My product is a service where the subscription gives all users of their organisation access to some functions once they have a subscription on their organisation account. Currently my customers are required to register & pay outside of the app (without mentioning it in the app, as required by the review guidelines) but now I would like to offer the possibility of subscribing within the app as well. The problem: User A starts a subscription for their organisation, and then leaves the company having forgotten about it. Now, the other users of the organisation want to upgrade or cancel their subscription. According to the documentation, there is no way for me as the service provider to cancel a subscription for an apple account - meaning that I would have to let multiple subscriptions run for the same account and hope that the user will notice and cancel it somehow. Question 1: What is the recommended way to handle this? I have e-mailed apple developer support and I was directed to this forum. Question 2: Does this business case still require me to use IAP for my subscriptions, or is there some exemption that allows me to use my own purchasing mechanism within the app or direct the users to an external one?

Please could someone with a company based in the UK let me know how the VAT/commission deduction works on app sales through Apple? If the customer pays £5.00 then is it as follows: User pays = £5.00; 20% VAT deduction = 83p;  Net = £4.17;  30% commission to Apple on net of £4.17 = £1.25;  Net payment to developer = £2.92. And does Apple provide a VAT statement on all sales too? Thanks - can't work this out from the lengthy Paid Applications Agreement!

Hello, I would like to know what options we have for premium-codes within the B2B area. How can we (under App-Store regulations) work together with companys to give out Corporate Logins for their employees? So if we work with a company together, the company can give their employees free access to the app. Is here a "standard way" of doing so? Thank you very much Hannah

Hello everyone, I have been reading forums lately, and found out that Apple Developer Enterprise Program users are having problem in renewing their accounts. Our company is using the same program as well and we are thinking if what would be the best program to use when we were not able to renew the license for the Enterprise program. We currently have 100+ Employees we are only distributing one app which is being used by 280+ customers and the app is currently installed in more or less 3000 devices. Looking forward for everyone's recommendation and reply. Thanks!

A question regarding compliance for 3.1 Payments 3.1.1 In-App Purchase: Any credits or in-game currencies purchased via in-app purchase may not expire, and you should make sure you have a restore mechanism for any restorable in-app purchases. We are developing a New Year event for our free-to-play game. Players will be able to earn a special event virtual currency (VC) and spend it on additional content. Since this specific VC can be earned for a limited time only, event-specific content for purchase is time-limited as well. Players will not have the products they can spend New Year VC on when New Year event is over. Once these products are no longer available we will refund any event VC left-overs with our regular evergreen VC. The question is can we add this event VC to in-app purchase bundles if the event VC is refunded with regular VC when unspent event VC expires

Hello everyone, We want to release of first version of our ios client app for our client/server application ecosystem, but we are facing to a serious issues and concerns with the way that apple offer to manage versioning and a really world of the B2B!! Our B2B market is only safety public agencies who need and use complex client/server ecosystem. Ours solutions is within those ecosystem. And our company as well as the client have to live with the legacy application. Also ours clients cannot all time keep upgrade to the last major version (ex : 9.10 , 9.11 . 9.12 etc..), or update the major version they using to the last fix/bug release (ex : 9.10.1234 to 9.10.1266, etc..) So this post it's to get information, discussion and advice regarding this issue and about the way to could pass over in the contect : how manage situation if apple doesn't want to offer enrollment to 'enterprise programs' ? Does are existing some way inside or outside apple program to manage those issue and the simplier way ? like tool to transfert or IPA to MDM of the B2B client for they release as they want the version! what could be the ways to avoid this issues regarding the development ? (in the way client/server) and what we could improve on a short and long term to be more 'apple B2B illusion wolrd! :D' Thanks you for your information and respond!

Hi, Is there any Server side API to fetch the price of a In-App Purchase product? Tried Appstore Connect API and Apple Server API. None of them gives the price value. Appstore connect API returns the list of in-app-purchases but price information is not returned. Is there any other server side API to get the price value of renewable products?

Hi all! I currently have a free app that has been available on the app store for about a year now, and I would like to create a paid version of this app which grants all features and unlockables to the user. The problem I am faced with is that the free version of the app already has around 400 users on the leaderboards, and I would like for the free-to-play users and pay-to-play users to be able to compete with each other over a shared leaderboard. Would it somehow be possible to link the 2 leaderboards between the 2 apps, or have the 2 apps reference the same leaderboard so that all users may compete with one another? Thanks in advance!

I'm trying to get some ideas on how others have implemented Tier 0 xx-day free trials. Can you recommend some non-subscriptions apps that have this functionality? Thanks!

I'd like to offer our potential customers (many of whom are schools / school districts) a free trial of our app, but it seems Apple School Manager does not allow for in-app purchases nor subscriptions. Unlike individual users, I can't offer schools a Tier 0 ($0) IAP which could give them a limited time access to a fully featured app. Similarly, I can't offer schools an introductory offer for a subscription. I came up with some alternatives but nothing is quite simple and direct. Freemium (Limited Features): Offer a free "lite" app with limited features and a paid "plus" app. I do this today, but it's far from perfect and it's moderately inconvenient to manage 2 apps. I'd like to offer schools a fully featured app so they can evaluate it in earnest. Freemium (Limited Credits): I suppose I could offer a free version and rather than limit the features, I could limit the quantity of uses/credits/actions that could be performed. I haven't researched this much, any best practices to keep in mind? Freemium (Limited Time): Could I offer a fully featured free app but have it stop "working" after a set period of time? Off-site Subscription: Sell subscriptions and manage user access myself (outside of the App Store). Many apps do this, but I'm trying to keep my life simple and also keep life simple for school IT manager who tell me they don't want to manage yet another off-site subscription. The other issue with IAPs is that for my customers who are not schools, instead they are families, who want to use family-sharing. I'm happy to support this and do so today, but IAPs can't be shared, so I'm still stuck with managing 2 apps (one free, one paid). And when users run into this issue, it's really confusing and frustrating for them. I'd like to avoid that. Perhaps I could instruct them to go purchase the paid app rather than offer an IAP to "unlock" the full feature set. For my sake, and more importantly for the sake of my customers (schools and families), I really wish Apple would make it easy for schools to access free trials for paid apps and/or subscriptions. If you have any other suggestions, I would love to hear them! Thanks.

After watching all related WWDC content on auto-renewing subscriptions, including the most recent 2021 session titled "Manage IAP On Your Server," it's still unclear what actions are required for developers when an auto-renewing subscription is initially purchased using Store Kit 1 + Server Notifications v2. From "Manage IAP On Your Server" around 21:30 a diagram of the initial subscription flow is shown: What is most unclear to me is: Is it necessary to retrieve the receipt data from the device and send it to the application server (to then be sent to Apple's server to verify and get the decoded data) if the App Store server is going to be sending a SUBSCRIBED + INITIAL_BUY notification around the same time to the application server anyway? If it is still necessary to verify the receipt data from the local device, then what purpose does the SUBSCRIBED + INITIAL_BUY notification serve? What should the application server do when this notification is received if the subscription status has already been updated based on the receipt data? It seems that the recommendation from Apple is to verify the receipt data from the device to obtain the original_transaction_id and then use this value to relate future server notifications received for this id. Looking at the JWSTransactionDecodedPayload, it includes a field called appAccountToken however, it appears as though this can only be utilized with the iOS15+ StoreKit2 API. It would be greatly appreciated if someone could clarify the required steps for managing an initial purchase on both the client and server for: StoreKit 1 + Server Notifications v2 StoreKit 2 + Server Notifications v2 (I would love to start with StoreKit 2; however, I don't think it is feasible to limit purchases to iOS15+ at this time, given the large # of users still using older versions of iOS.) Thank you!

Hello, In wwdc 2021 keynote 7th june video on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TD96VTf0Xs) there was a mention of unlocking doors via apple wallet. For home, it uses home keys which is part of the homekit framework. This is simple to understand since there is enough documentation on adding support to our hardware. For office though we can't find any documentation. What are the requirements on the hardware/firmware side? I'm assuming we can't use homekit for offices since each organisation will have a few admins but 100+ employees. Admin cannot be bothered with adding so many appleids one by one as given in homekit tutorial. We are a smart access control company that manufacturers bluetooth and nfc based hardware for unlocking doors. These doors can be unlocked with iphone through our app over ble as of now. We would like to add functionality to simply tap the phone/watch to our hardware to unlock the door. As mentioned in the wwdc21, other brands like proxy, hid and salto seems to have already partnered up with apple and we would like to join that list

Hello, my game is made in Unity for iOS how to test In-App events which I have added in AppStore.

Hi, We are working on a Xamarin project that needs to get the date of purchase of a Paid App that was posted in Appstore. I can see in iOS the receipt data is extracted from the bundle. If i deletes the app, and then reinstalls it, is the receipt still in the bundle ? If not how to get the receipt?

Hello, So, I have an app: the majority of downloads are coming from AppStore search. Soon I am planning a big update, and I was thinking about changing my app to a paid version. I am afraid of what will happen with my keywords rankings. Will they reset after I change my app type? How about future competition: do I have to have the same or more downloads compared with my "free" rivals or do downloads of paid app weigh more than free ones? In general, I am trying to figure out how ASO works with paid applications compared with free ones, but couldn't find any articles about that. Thanks in advance

Hello, let's say that at a certain point I have two published apps on the App Store. One is the main iOS application, that is a paid app, and the other is a limited version of the main one, like a "lite" version. Let's say that they are both published because the lite version was accepted by the reviewers (indeed it is what should happen). The lite version is a complimentary app that can be used for just using the main functions when some third party provided you the content. But some users could be interested in having the complete version to be able to author or edit the content themselves. I would like to know if it is acceptable that in the "lite" app -there is a button clearly pointing to the App Store page of the main app -a menu entry -a hyper-link in the guide. -other options Thanks

I would like to know if a function is available in Swift or Objective-C for an iOS 14+ application to retrieve the very first installation date of the app from the App Store on any device. It would be useful for me to grant full access to the app features in the case I introduce the freemium model for my app. I asked aboout this change here Free app introducing in-app purchase for some features I want to grant the full functionality to users that installed the free version as I pointed out in a further comment, but no one answered. I do not know if this is possible without App Store server interrogation, I mean with just an information that is on the device registry because the app is installed, and refers to the first installation ever, not on this device alone, and not being lost with factory reset procedure or similar. Alternately another useful information would be the most ancient app version or build number that the user got from the App Store ever. Some suggest to deploy an intermediate version that stores the app version or build number in some persistent user data location. Thanks