Hi all, I've been observing what appears to be a timing mismatch in how Apple handles Korea trial-to-paid consent, and I wanted to see if other developers are seeing the same thing.
Per Korean regulations effective Feb 14, 2025, Apple must obtain explicit user consent before converting a free trial to a paid subscription. Apple handles this via email, push notifications, and an in-app consent option accessible from Settings > Subscriptions.
For a 7-day trial in the Republic of Korea storefront, I'm observing:
- Consent push notifications (Agree to continue your subscription without interruption) start arriving ~1 day after trial redemption, at roughly hourly frequency.
- However, when the user taps the push and navigates to Settings > Subscriptions, there is no consent option available. The only visible action is "Cancel Free Trial".
- The consent option only becomes available around day 4 of the trial (i.e., 3 days before renewal, matching Apple's documented messaging cadence [1]).
- For the first ~3 days, users receive hourly push notifications they cannot act on. The only way to stop them is to cancel the subscription entirely.
This is happening across multiple apps in the Korean App Store, so it appears to be a platform-level behavior rather than an app-specific issue.
Is anyone else observing this behavior? Any insight from Apple engineers or other developers would be greatly appreciated.