Apple Pay or In-App Purchase?

Hi,


I'm building a small marketplace style app where users can get feedack on something they made (example: their cv). They could pick a reviewer inside the app and send the CV to them, and the reviewer would be able to review their cv and set a price. Reviewer is able to review the CV inside the app and a digital content will be created after all.

Users pay after. (review is created, but hidden/not shown until its paid for).


The flow: User asks for feedback > Reviewer accepts, writes feedback > sets price > User can decide if they are willing to pay. (otherwise they do not see it)


What should I use for something like this? Apple Pay or In-App Purchase? TBH, im not sure if this would be in the realms of an In-app purchase as its a service after all.


Thanks for the help,

Zsombor

Replies

>Apple Pay or In-App Purchase?


Two different things - I don't think anything has changed since this 2017 thread:


https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/70962

You can't use IAP to pay the other person for services rendered outside of the app. You can use Apple Pay.


But some of what you are selling is enabled through the app - like the search for a reviewer or selecting the reviewer. Maybe even some of the services are using app functionality. If you wish to sell that then you divide the sale into two components - one is IAP and the other is Apple Pay. So a user might upgrade their app so they can see all reviewers' qualifications or a reviewer might upgrade so they can advertise their qualifications or a user might.... All that would be sold through IAP since it is part of the app code. Once the reviewer and user are connected, the reviewer would charge and get paid through non-IAP systems.

Hi,


I have now sent in my app for review (Apple Pay with Stripe as the payment provider) and Apple told me to use IAP because the content is consumed within the app. (Reviewer created content that is not visible until the user pays).


I'm not sure the reviewers will reply to me at this point so I'm asking here as well:


For this flow:

- User asks for a review on their photo and sends the request to reviewers

- Reviewer decides if they want to give a review, and if so, they are able to decide to give it for free or for a price.

- If they decide to ask for a price, the user will not see the content until they pay. Once they do, they will see the content.


To solve this with IAP, I would need to manually, by-hand, register all the reviews/digital contents as products with screenshots in app store connect which is not really viable and scalable OR implement a consumable currency like coins.


In this case (coins) would it be ok to purchase this digital content through these coins? Because I really can't put the reviews as a non-consumable IAPs as it does not make sense (its created at random times by other users) and there is no way I can scale and handle if there are more than 10 review requests per day. It is also really error-prone and I would pretty much need to hardcode the product identifiers into the app before the reviews are actually made which is not ideal. As far as I know there is also a limit of like 10.000 in app purchase products per app.

This is the reason why I think IAP won't work in my use case. The only way this could work is if Apple is OK with a consumable coin used for purchasing digital content. In this case however I can't use the restore functionality because the reviews are not non-consumable products and they do not exist in app store connect. This means that its kind of a hack around a proper solution and I'm not sure its viable.


Could you elaborate on how I should solve this issue?