Mac App Store application receipt updated 3 days after a purchase

A few customers are experiencing this :

  • They make a purchase on a non consumable item.
  • The purchase apparently process normaly
  • The device trigger a paymentQueue:updatedTransactions: in the observer, that we send to our server to register a pending transaction. The transaction is acknowledged (finishTransaction:)
  • Then the device pick-up the application receipt and send it to our server for further processing.
  • This receipt has no IAP in the array.
  • Restoring purchase triggers again a new transaction, receipt is not updated either
  • The receipt eventually got updated, sometime a few minutes, hours or even 3 days later.


We monitor this because customer contact our support. So we are able to manually activate the purchase, asking them to restore transaction some time later just for a checking purpose. So at some point we receive a valid application receipt to consolidate our server side purchase database.


We have about ten years experience with IAP on iOS. Our Mac companion application launched a few months ago and most purchases process as they should.


We suspected a payment issue. Recently a customer reported that the payment was dated on the day or purchase, while the receipt came 3 days later. So we have no clue beside some kind of inconsistency on Apple servers. So payement should not be involved.


Related or not we logged some rare errors while validating receipt :

Receipt: {"status":21199, "environment":"Production", "is_retryable":true, "exception":"com.apple.jingle.commercelogic.inappcache.MZInAppCacheAccessException"}


There have been other thread about the application receipt not being updated. Mainly involving auto-renewable subscription. Before postin a bug report, I'd like to know if this is a known issue

Replies

As far as I know, it is a known issue. That doesn't mean you shouldn't file a bug report. It also doesn't mean it will ever get fixed. By my very rough estimate, about 99% of purchases go through without a problem. But that means there is a reliable 1% failure rate.


This is the nature of the consumer marketplace. Your business is sustained by the vast majority of people who buy your products with no problems. The rest is a support problem.