Restorations of non-consumable purchases suddenly failing in an old app

Going back about 10 days we've been getting reports of "cannot connect to iTunes" errors when users try to restore their purchases to a different device. These steps have worked for those affected:

1) Sign out of the App Store on your device: in your Settings app > "iTunes & App Stores", tap your Apple ID, then "Sign Out" (don't sign back in yet)

2) Return to the app and again tap "Restore Previous Purchase". When prompted, sign back in.

I'm not sure what's changed recently, but so many reports of that error has definitely been unusual.

Thanks! I've sent this on to the affected customers - I'll mark it as correct if it works for them.

Yeah - Customer has replied to confirm this works. Thanks for the tip!

We have also been getting many reports daily from users who can't purchase or restore the iAP in our apps, since February 21. I've reported it to Apple, and I suggest you do the same. Signing out and in to iTunes does fix it, but there are many users who presumably give up and delete the app rather than ask for support, so I don't consider that a real solution.

I was told yesterday that they couldn't find a problem and I should ask customers to contact AppleCare, so it's important that Apple hears from other developers receiving reports of this issue so they can appreciate the scale of the problem.

For all issues such as this where the behavior of the purchase or restore process suddenly changes, it's best to submit a bug report - most likely a "fix" fro some iTunes Store issue uncovered a new issue which was not detected in sandbox testing. Please submit the bug report as follows

1 naviage to the Apple Developer Bug Report web page - http://bugreport.apple.com

2. please select the Product "iTunesConnect", version "Other"

3. Make sure to include the application ID. It's also important to include the iTunes Store which the customer is reporting the issue with - US, Canada, Mexico, China, Russia, etc. In some cases, the issue is with the store. Unless the store is specified, the Apps Ops Engineering QA team will attempt to replicate the problem with the US iTunes store.

3a, unless it's obvious, please include the instructions for finding the in app purchase. If a login is required make sure to provide a test account or a description as to what the login process requires. Also, please include the instructions for finding the Restore function.

When you have submitted the bug report, please send me the bug report number and I'll forward the report to the Apps Ops Engineering team for investigation.

rich kubota - rkubota@apple.com

developer technical support CoreOS/Hardware/MFI

Hi Rich,

We've been seeing this problem for the last few weeks. Since signing out and back in fixes the problem, and we do that fairly regularly on all our devices, we haven't been able to reproduce the problem. This has gone from never happening to becoming our most common support request, though, so we're definitely searching for ideas for how to fix this. Thanks again for your help. Our bug report is 30988639.