We are testing an annual auto-renewable subscription with the monthly 12-payment commitment in App Store Sandbox. The Sandbox tester is configured for 3-minute monthly renewals.
Is commitmentExpiresDate supposed to follow that accelerated schedule? Our signed transactions initially report an end almost six days away, but the commitment actually completes in about 41 minutes.
In one complete 12-payment lifecycle on 8 Oct 2026 (all times UTC):
- Payment 1: purchased at 16:34:04; installment ends at 16:37:04; commitmentExpiresDate is 14 Oct 06:13:04 — almost
six days away.
- Payment 2: commitmentExpiresDate is 13 Oct 19:04:04.
- Payment 3: commitmentExpiresDate is 8 Oct 17:28:04.
- Payment 4: commitmentExpiresDate is 12 Oct 18:24:02 — jumping forward by about four days.
- Payments 6 and 9 again report ends on 8 Oct, while payments 7 and 8 report dates days away.
- Payment 12: both expiresDate and commitmentExpiresDate are 8 Oct 17:14:44, followed by EXPIRED/VOLUNTARY. The actual elapsed time since payment 1 was 40 minutes 40 seconds, including delayed Sandbox renewals.
We compared all 12 signed App Store Server Notifications V2 transactions with independently fetched signed transactions from the Sandbox Get Transaction Info API. The values match. billingPeriodNumber advances from 1 through 12 on the same commitment. There was no DID_RENEW/BILLING_RECOVERY. The first date changes occurred before we disabled post-commitment renewal after payment 3.
Apple’s documentation says to use commitmentExpiresDate from the latest transaction and describes a changed date after billing recovery. Here it changes drastically on ordinary renewals, and the initial date appears incompatible with the Sandbox renewal rate.
Is this a known Sandbox issue? Should commitmentExpiresDate reflect the 3-minute/month schedule? Can we rely on it remaining consistent across ordinary payments in production, or is there another recommended source for the full commitment end date?
We can provide the transaction IDs and all 12 decoded transactions privately for investigation.