28.6 · App Review rules, external purchases and designing a billing platform
Money rules change faster than APIs, and a billing platform outlives any single SDK. Both reward designing for change.
Mental model. Keep policy (what you may sell and link to, per region) in configuration, and keep truth (who owns what) in an event-sourced store you can rebuild.
Rules
In-app purchase requirements, external links and regional differences.
- What do App Review rules require for digital goods and subscriptions, and how do external purchase links and regional rules change that?
What I am confident about. Under the App Store Review Guidelines, digital content, features and subscriptions unlocked inside an app generally must use In-App…
Platform design
Designing a billing and entitlement service end to end.
- Design the billing and entitlement platform for an app with iOS, Android and web subscriptions and a backend API.
Core idea: one entitlement service, many payment sources. Each store is an ingestor that turns its own events into a normalised internal event (GRANTED…
More in Purchases & subscriptions
- 28.1 · Products, prices, the purchase call, verification and the update stream
- 28.2 · Subscription groups, renewal states, grace period, billing retry and offers
- 28.3 · What the user owns: entitlements, restore, family sharing, refunds and revocation
- 28.4 · JWS, certificate chains, notifications, the Server API and why receipts gave way to transactions
- 28.5 · Paywall design, price display and testing with StoreKit configuration, sandbox and TestFlight
- 28.7 · Building the integration: the store object, the catalogue, the SwiftUI views, status, account tokens and tests