How to test renewable subscriptions (App Store)

Question

I\'m implementing auto renewable subscriptions in my app and I wonder if there is a way to simulate when a subscription period runs out and a new transaction is created.

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Answer 1

Actually the renewal doesn't seem to work in Sandbox. It looks like you're always into the buying process. Auto-renewal is supposed to be "shadowed" as AppStore will automatically re-conduct it until the user explicitly "cancel" it. In the Sandbox, each 5 minutes you have to purchase again.

Finally, there's a bug in the "You Already purchased that in-app" as it is supposed to send a proper transaction but it just sends an Error code.

Answer 2

Actually, I experience the renewal in the Sandbox to be very unpredictable. Sometimes it works as described, sometimes it works very differently, sometimes it doesn't work at all (saying that as a developer with an app in store that actually uses In-App-Purchases with autorenewable subscriptions, apparently successfully in production). Just at the moment I have a monthly subscription in the sandbox that has an original purchase date from 27 hours back and an expiry date of three hours back. I really wonder how you are supposed to test this if the responses are absurd like that.

Answer 3

The sandbox environment automatically simulates subscription renewal. 1 year subscriptions will renew every 1 hour. 1 month subscriptions appear to renew every 5-6 minutes.

Each subscription appears to renew 5x. At that point, the subscription is cancelled. Each renewal triggers a restored transaction sent to the client app.

This is all based on my experience. I cannot find any official documentation for it from Apple.

Answer 4

Are you sure you need to simulate this? I think you'll find that in the sandbox, the subscription lengths are made very short so that all you have to do is get a cup of coffee or something and they will expire and then you can test what happens.

the amount of time varies depending on the length of the subscription, but I think the 7 day subscription expires in just a few minutes in the sandbox.