Referral program for subscription app

You won't get a response from an Apple person on this forum to a policy question.

The problem you have is the ever present possibility that you would 'sell' those promo codes outside of the IAP system thereby getting around the 30% fee Apple charges for distributing code - this is a violation of guideline 3.1.1. Also, 3.1.1 says you can't 'gift' IAP consumables to someone else. So I think your approach has problems.

After a good night's sleep, I disagree with myself.

Any app can reward a user for performance (e.g. after getting 10,000 points by shooting Mario) by letting the user advance to the next level (e.g. the next maze) - or you can purchase access to the next level through IAP. So why not reward someone for getting new users? It has to be done within the app - there can't be any way of gifting someone from outside the app to avoid the possibility of payments outside IAP.

One way to implement this is to let user 1 email other people from within the app with a link that opens the app's page in the App Store and another link that opens the app on the new user's device and contains a reference to user 1. If the new user has never credited another user then when they tap that second link they credit user 1 through a posting on CloudKit using reference in the link.

I'm thinking through this exact same scenario. Could you please tell me if anything worked out for you?

Apple rejected one of my apps recently for allowing an activation code to be used to unlock subscription content. They advised one of the following methods instead--the only acceptable methods:

1. Activation through SMS. I wasn't interested so I didn't ask for any more details, but now I'm curious how that could work.

2. A deep link would contain the activation code so the user can apply it by opening the link rather than through entering the code in the app.

3. Link the credit to the user's account so that it's automatically applied through logging in.

So I think this could be done on my website. The app could link to a web page where the user logs in and enters the code. The license is credited to his account and he sees a success message next time he opens the app.

Do you think Apple would accept this? Have you found any iOS apps which tie referrals to subscription time?

There is a company called Reef Referral that does something like this, wonder how they get around the app review process.