IOS Swift Question posted in
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Ios swift – StoreKit 2: User to user auto-renewing subscriptions

We have an iOS app with features similar to a blog or most social apps, ie creators can make posts. We want to allow other users to be able to subscribe to a creator to access their premium content, eg the OnlyFans model.

After reading through a ton of threads and docs, I used to think user-to-user auto-renewing subscriptions weren’t possible with In-App Purchases for a few reasons, the main one being that every subscription group has to be created by the app developer and reviewed by Apple before it can be used. I even contacted RevenueCat to ask about this and they said it wasn’t possible without using a 3rd party payment service like Stripe, which we all know is a good way to get removed from the app store.

Recently I’m starting to see more iOS apps supporting this model, such as Instagram and Patreon. I’m thinking something may have changed, but I’m not sure what. Does anyone know how these big companies are implementing auto-renewing user-to-user subscriptions with In-App Purchases?

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Answers


  1. 0

    We tried building this for our fashion creator app and ran into the same problem. The best solution was to implement peer-to-peer subscriptions with Stripe. You can have a parent organization and have creators self-serve. Patreon allows for viewing but routes people to pay online only.

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  2. 0

    As you may know, there’s a policy in the App Store that allows external payment methods for certain categories of apps as written here.

    3.1.3 Other Purchase Methods: The following apps may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase.

    I think it is most probably the case for Patreon. However, Instagram should be a different story.

    I have tried to purchase a subscription from the iOS app and it looks like the screenshot. It shows an ordinal purchasing sheet so they must be using IAP but the item name is Instagram Subscriptions 368… a bit weird huh?

    enter image description here

    Next, this picture is the IAP items displayed on the Instagram page in the App Store. As you can see, there are a lot of subscriptions named Instagram Subscriptions ${number} and also prices are so duplicated.

    enter image description here

    Given them all, this is the best guess I can make at the moment on how Instagram implements person-to-person (1:n) subscriptions.

    1. A creator creates(more like apply/submit) a subscription in the App.
    2. Then Instagram creates a corresponding subscription in App Store Connect (should be automated by App Store Connect API) and submits a review to Apple under the hood.
    3. Once it’s approved it’s shown in the creator’s profile screen and users can subscribe to it in the App.

    What’s your take on this? If we can know how the system (especially UI/UX) works on the creator side, it must be clue as well.

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