Anyone else seeing renewals show up as activations for auto-renewing subscriptions in App Store Connect?
Our app is almost 2 months old on the App Store and we have had monthly subscriptions starting to sell almost on day one so we've had one full subscription monthly cycle go by for a bunch of our paid users. We noticed though that after 4-5 weeks, there was only one subscription renewal shown but we also were't seeing cancellations or a drop in our subscriber numbers. We just kept seeing more activations. Now at the 8 week mark we are very sure that renewals are showing as activations instead since our subscriber numbers aren't tanking, but instead slowly climbing, and we've only had a handful of renewals or cancellations.
We'll see say 10 subscription activations in a day but then our total paid subscriber numbers only go up by 5, so once again, assuming 5 are actually renewals and not activations.
We do see refunds but at the exact same time as a longer subscription period sells so assuming an upgrade and the total paid subscribers doesn't go down.
Supposedly our retention rate is 2% but that doesn't seem to match our subscriber numbers at all. Assume this is due to renewals being counted as activations instead.
We are NOT using server side validation or tracking of sales, using StoreKit to validate on device and unlock features. So all of this is from the App Store Connect web site.
None of this is really an issue right this moment but longer term we'd like to better understand how our retention is going vs new sales. Are we just misunderstanding what the categories mean? We assume this isn't an issue with how we implemented StoreKit in the app but maybe it is?
Thanks!
Colin
