Subscription on digital item warranting physical product(s)

You wrote:

>end-users pay a recurring fee for a membership (which is a digital product) that warrants a customizable (by vendors) array of a certain amount of physical products per subscription cycle.

If this is a single payment it seems to violate one or another guideline and is a non-starter. Can you break it up into two payments - one for the digital product (use IAP) and another for the physical product (use third party system)? I believe the third party payment system for a physical product can be done inside the app or from a direct link in the app. The no-link rule is for a 'reader' app and you can't sell digital products (other than reader app content) through means other than IAP so the 'no link' is irrelevant, it just becomes 'no'.

Hello

It's not a single payment, it's a subscription that renews, and there's also a free mode ("base membership"), so it doesn't require payment to use the app to begin with. I don't see what guidelines this would violate?

There is no way to make it "two payments" - the subscription is for the physical items that it warrants, it's just exchanged by vendor by displaying the digital product, so the digital product itself has no value. Think of it as an automatic purchase of an entry ticket each week/month/whatever.

And to the last part: Apple cannot ever know if an app provides payment for anything outside the app if it is nowhere written inside the app, which seems to be acceptable and is a workaround currently employed by a lot of apps.

The problem is that a user purchasing the 'physical goods' subscription cannot get anything more than the physical goods. If they did, then you would be unlocking code in the app with a means other than IAP. I guess you could the app could give the user some sort of QR code that a vendor would accept as payment. But it sounded like you were doing much more stuff through the app code - and only 'physical goods' subscription payers were getting to do that more stuff. That more stuff is digital - either give it to all users, whether or not they have a 'physical goods' subscription, or sell it (and not the physical goods) through IAP.

Consider this model - Free app. For a low cost IAP you also get to purchase (not through IAP) real world goods and pick them up at the local vendor.

By the way - a subscription is time defined and does not expire during that time period no matter how many things a user uses/buys/exchanges. You may be selling a consumable product, not a subscription, that is exchanged for something else and consumed in the exchange.

But this puts me somewhere inbetween two rules, because I cannot use IAP for physical goods - that's not allowed, and I must use IAP for a digital product. But in my case the digital product is equal to a physical product. It's the same thing in the end. I am not unlocking digital functionality, I am just exchanging payment for what is actually a QR code inside the app. And anyone can get the "free" QR code, it just doesn't necessarily exchange for anything (this is up to each vendor) physical.

An equivalent case would be where someone buys a ticket (which is a digital "product") and then exchanges the ticket for an entry at a concert (or whatever). This approach cannot not use IAP according to Apple. I do the same thing, only I do it on a subscription. The app is free, the base membership is free, but an upgraded membership which warrants physical products is not (usually - again, I don't decide) free, obviously, since a physical product usually isn't free.

The subscription doesn't "expire" after it's used - but if you subscribe to a membership that gives you 10 entry tickets each month, then the subscription is obviously not worth anything after you've used all 10 tickets, until it renews again - but again, these tickets are physical products.

You are not 'in between' two rules, you are violating one or the other because you are conflating two products - the physical good and the digital good. If you are giving away the digital good then fine - that is, if you issue 10 $0 value QR codes to users who don't subscribe then you are not unlocking code using the subscription and there is no problem.

So: An online bought concert ticket is a digital product that converts to a physical service/product (the entry to a venue), and you cannot buy tickets using IAP, but nobody gets free tickets included in a free version of a ticket app. How is that different from what I am doing? Only replace "ticket" with something else tangible and make it subscription-based instead of a one-off purchase.

Would the difference lie in it being a subscription and not a one-off purchase? I have a hard time following your logic.

In your example above you are paying for the ticket through a third party system, not IAP. That's ok.

Expanding on your example above, anyone can purchase tickets from Ticketmaster or SuperTicketMaster and anybody can see all the tickets that are available for purchase. The ability to buy from SuperTicketMaster and the ability to see all the tickets that are available for sale are digital goods (not the tockets themselves). AND HERE'S THE RUB - If you changed your example so that only subscribers could purchase tickets from SuperTicketMaster and only subscribers could see all the tickets that were available for sale then that subscription purchase would have to be an IAP and that subscription purchase, because it was done by IAP, could not include tickets.

In your original post you described a system where you had to subscribe through a non-IAP system in order to do certain digital things. People who did not subscribe could not do those digital things.

What I was proposing was an IAP that gave you the ability to see the many offerings and a different system for purchasing one of those offerings.

Okay. I see what you mean with that.

What you would be subscribing to in my case is the actual physical products. I'll elaborate with a more concrete example, because my case is closely related to a gym membership; a digital membership that you subscribe to, but which yields physical services. This is (as far as I know) allowed by Apple and also exemplified by Stripe here https://stripe.com/docs/mobile/ios#using-stripe-and-apple-pay-vs-in-app-purchases

Any user can log into the app and be a free member. The free membership may give you some perks (also physical), but you can then choose to upgrade your membership to a premium (or whatever) membership that yields additional physical products/services. The app works in the same way and no extra funtionality is unlocked if you purchase a premium membership; a premium membership is presented inside the app in the same way as as a free membership, it just comes with additional physical services attached. The gym-scenario comes very close to what I'm doing: In a gym a subscription you also unlock physical perks such as the ability to work out whenever you want or maybe a free protein bar each day - both physical services/goods that you pay for inside the app, auto-renewing each month.

The digital product is only what the QR code in the membership can unlock in the real world, not the QR code itself, as that is always there - here I'm thinking that's what you meant with "10x 0$ QR codes" as a solution, is it not?

I hope I've made my case more clear.