Hi everyone — looking for guidance from developers who’ve dealt with App Review + subscriptions.
We’ve submitted our iOS app for review and have been rejected 3 times related to subscriptions / in-app purchase rules.
Here’s our setup:
We offer a Premium subscription that unlocks extra features in the app.
We do NOT allow users to purchase/subscribe inside the iOS app. There is no IAP, no checkout, and no purchase flow in the app.
Users can only subscribe outside the app (on our website).
If a user already has a Premium account (subscribed on the website), they can log in on iOS and use all Premium features inside the app.
To us, this appears similar to what apps like Spotify do: from the iOS app you can’t subscribe to Premium via IAP; they direct users to the website, and once subscribed externally, Premium works inside the app. We’ve shared this context with the review team, but we still haven’t gotten a clear explanation of what specifically is not allowed in our case.
My questions to the community:
Is this model acceptable under App Store guidelines (no in-app purchase, subscription only on the web, and premium features unlocked after login)?
If it is acceptable, what is the recommended way to present this to App Review so the app gets approved? (e.g., specific wording, metadata notes, review notes, removing certain UI, etc.)
If it’s not acceptable, what’s the correct approach Apple expects for a Premium subscription that unlocks digital features?
Has anyone had a similar rejection and successfully resolved it — what changes or steps worked?
Any advice on how to get this approved would be hugely appreciated.
See below the example from Spotify app on IOS.