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My iOS app update just got declined due to the fact that we are prompting users to register before they purchase a subscription. 

Guideline 5.1.1 - Legal - Privacy - Data Collection and Storage


We noticed that your app requires users to register with personal information to purchase non account-based in-app purchase products, which does not comply with the App Store Review Guidelines.

Apps cannot require user registration prior to allowing access to app content and features that are not associated specifically to the user.

Next Steps

User registration that requires the sharing of personal information must be optional or tied to account-specific functionality.

To resolve this issue, please make it clear to the user that registering will enable them to access the content from any of their iOS devices and provide them a way to register at any time, if they wish to later extend access to additional iOS devices.

Please note that although guideline 3.1.2 of the App Store Review Guidelines requires an app to make subscription content available to all the iOS devices owned by a single user, it is not appropriate to force user registration to meet this requirement; such user registration must be made optional.

Ok.... I understand they are trying to make the best experience for the user, but the final requirement seems contradicting.

Does anyone know how I'm supposed to provide the subscription content available to all iOS devices for a single user, without requiring them to create a user? How can I make content available to the user across all of their devices if there is no user account?

James Parker
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  • Some discussion [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20913875/non-renewing-subscriptions-removed-from-receipt) but approaches include storing subscription status in iCloud or verifying the receipt purchase date against your server having restored purchases on the additional device. – Paulw11 Mar 07 '20 at 20:22
  • I was thinking that maybe they just expect you to store the receipt hash on the local device and use that to reference a users subscription status. Which is tons of fun because then I have to handle subscriptions entirely different on the front end for iOS devices vs Android and the web. – James Parker Mar 07 '20 at 20:32
  • How would that help you on another device? You need to store it on a server somewhere. iCloud is a server account that most users will already have (but it is not required that they have logged in to iCloud) or you can restore using the receipt. – Paulw11 Mar 07 '20 at 20:34
  • They aren’t telling me I need to give the user access across all devices. They are telling me I can’t require them to create an account. I’m just trying to figure out whatto store on the device so that I have something unique so that I can send it to the server and check the status of the subscription. I think the only thing I can do is store the receipt and use that. If they delete the app they will just have to do a ‘restore’ to get their subscription back. – James Parker Mar 07 '20 at 20:51
  • The receipt is the only thing you have. You can use iCloud to make the process more automatic and seamless when they do have an iCloud account logged in to their devices (I suspect a majority of users will) – Paulw11 Mar 07 '20 at 21:20
  • In the end I feel like this is just them inadvertently starting to force the implementation of ‘Apple Sign In’ and not saying it directly to avoid anti-trust issues. – James Parker Mar 08 '20 at 15:38
  • I don't see that at all. Specifically, requiring the user to create an account prior to accessing app content is the issue; The way that the account is created doesn't matter. Apple have had the requirement for accounts to be optional and for purchases to be available across devices for many years. – Paulw11 Mar 08 '20 at 19:52
  • The account is optional before accessing all of the functionality that doesn’t require an account. We only ask them to sign up for an account at the time of purchasing a subscription. Having an account is required to make the subscription based content available across all platforms and devices. – James Parker Mar 08 '20 at 20:44

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This is directly related to apple updating their guidelines.

Apps that authenticate or set up user accounts must support Sign in with Apple if required by guideline 4.8 of the App Store Review Guidelines.

I’m not exactly sure when they made this update. But I recurved and email on 3/27/2020 stating that they had extended the deadline for apps to implement this change until 6/30/2020

James Parker
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