Multiple items in one subscription

Hey everyone,


I’d like to implement a model where we have multiple items under a single non-renewing subscription id. Think of something similar to a movie subscription service where you can subscribe to watch a movie for a period of time. I have thousands of movies in my catalog but I don't want to have thousands of product identifiers. It looks like it should be ok by Apple terms.


My biggest concern now is identifying which purchases belong to which "movies". In case, for example, that I want to find out if the user cancelled their subscription to any of the "movies".


What would be the best way to do this?


Thank you,


Fran

Replies

see https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/118785

Thanks for the reply, PBK!


We've changed our mind and we're thinking auto-renewable subscriptions now. Is there any way we could avoid having thousands of product ids so that we could have a product that is a "Subscribe to one movie for a month" and that we internally, on our side, associate with a particular product?

>auto-renewable subscriptions......Is there any way we ..... could have a product that is a "Subscribe to one movie for a month" and that we internally, on our side, associate with a particular product?


Why not? But if it it is autorenewable then what happens after that month? If the subscription autorenews what do they get? Will you allow them to freely change the one movie they get? If so, you could easily have, say, 5 autorenewable subscription products labeled "A" and "B" and "C" and "D" and "E". If a user has 3 active subscriptions (B, D and E) then they get to chose 3 movies on your server, one for each active subscription. You get to decide if and when they can switch the movie choice for that subscription. And if they let one subscription lapse (e.g. D) then they lose that movie. Then what will happen if they resubscribe to D - are they stuck with that previous movie or can they switch?

If we were to implement that model, if user subscribes to movie D, then lets it lapse and purchases it again, we'd let him choose a new movie. We'd treat the auto-renewable subscriptions as "slots" that user could fill with whichever movie they want.


What is really missing for us is the piece of the receipt that we could use to associate a subscription to a particular movie. What would that be, the transaction identifier or the original transaction identifier? How can we match on our server a particular subscription to a piece of our content?


Are there any downsides to using these identifiers to do this kind of association on our end?

Your subscription, as you stated, gives the user 'slots'. The receipt can be used to determine how many 'slots' the user has. It is up to you, the app and your server to assign movies to those slots.