Auto-renewable subscription to an ad-free version?

Greetings,


We have a free, banner ad supported app on the App Store, and right now we're exploring the idea of providing the option to remove ads for a period of time using the auto-renewable subscriptions. A subscribed user will not see the ads that are normally shown throughout the app's interface until the subscription is cancelled, after which the banner ads will appear again.


We couldn't find a clear answer in the review guidelines or other sources: Does this model (limited-time, renewable subscription for ad removal) conform to review guidelines for the usage of auto-renewable subscriptions? Would our in-app purchase get rejected because "it doesn't provide new content for subscribers" or something like that? Is there any other app that you can point us out that implements the auto-renewable subscriptions solely for removing advertising?


The subscription (at least currently) does not provide access to any other premium features. It simply removes banner ads for the duration of the subscription.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Replies

They recently expanded the types of stuff that can be sold under an auto renewable subscription - but I don't recall whether it included ad removal. You can certainly do this with a non-renewing subscription.

Thank you for your response. Yeah, we saw many existing apps that make use of non-renewable subscriptions for this kind of thing but as you said, allowed uses of of auto-renewables are a lot wider than before after recent changes, and we're not sure if these include our case or not. Using auto-renewables is much more advantageous for us for a variety of reasons, so we want to go with that if that is a possibility, or be sure that it isn't before we start off implementing the non-renewable way.


As always, the response we've got from the app review guys was quite unhelpful. They're basically saying they will not comment on anything until we implement the feature and submit it to review. We obviously are not keen to spend hours of work only to get rejected in review at the end, so we're still looking for more information on the subject.

Some time has elapsed since your contribution. Could I ask how you solved it?

I also have to implement exactly a model like that in my app, subscriptions for removal of ads solely and i was exactly thinking the same thing as you. Would you please let us know your findings on the subject? would it be okay to use auto-renewables?

Hey- Have you received any more info on this?