When to refresh a receipt vs restore purchases in iOS?

Question

Our iOS app uses in-app purchases, both one-time and an auto-renewing subscription. Both these are non-consumable.

iOS offers two APIs: refresh receipt, and restore

Answer 1

You need to read this Restoring Purchased Products to understand the purposes between the 2.

From iOS 7, every app downloaded from the store has a receipt (for downloading/buying the app) at appStoreReceiptURL. When users purchases something via In App Purchase, the content at appStoreReceiptURL is updated with purchases information. Most of the cases, you just need to refresh the receipt (at appStoreReceiptURL) so that you know which transactions users have made.

Users restore transactions to maintain access to content they’ve already purchased. For example, when they upgrade to a new phone, they don’t lose all of the items they purchased on the old phone. Include some mechanism in your app to let the user restore their purchases, such as a Restore Purchases button. Restoring purchases prompts for the user’s App Store credentials, which interrupts the flow of your app: because of this, don’t automatically restore purchases, especially not every time your app is launched.

In most cases, all your app needs to do is refresh its receipt and deliver the products in its receipt. The refreshed receipt contains a record of the user’s purchases in this app, on this device or any other device. However, some apps need to take an alternate approach for one of the following reasons:

If you use Apple-hosted content, restoring completed transactions gives your app the transaction objects it uses to download the content. If you need to support versions of iOS earlier than iOS 7, where the app receipt isn’t available, restore completed transactions instead.

Refreshing the receipt asks the App Store for the latest copy of the receipt. Refreshing a receipt does not create any new transactions.

Restoring completed transactions creates a new transaction for every completed transaction the user made, essentially replaying history for your transaction queue observer.

More about receipt, from WWDC 2017, What's new in StoreKit session https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/303/

You can also watch WWDC 2017, session Advanced StoreKit for more detail https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/305/

Answer 2

Refreshing the receipt gets the latest copy of the receipt for the current user (Apple Id user). Your device may contain a receipt which is out of date. There can be scenarios where you may need this validation.

Consider a case your app maintains user accounts and you offer a auto-renewing subscription in your app, with a trial period for new users. A user signs up on your app with an account (say accA) and avails the purchase with the trial period. Once the trial period is about to expire, she cancels the subscription and deletes the app.

Few months down the line, the same real world person installs the app again (on the same device or another device with same App store apple id) but this time they sign up afresh with a new account(say accB). Your app has no way to know this person has already taken the trial period and thus your app's UI shows them a trial period for this subscription is available. The user hops on to avail the trial period but since she's logged in with the same Apple Id on the App store, and trial period has already been availed, she will be charged for the subscription.

The above situation can be frustrating for a user who was not deliberately trying to cheat into the system to avail a trial period but had forgotten her previous purchase and fell into the trap of UI showing trial period being available.

To circumvent this situation, whenever a user tries to make a first purchase in your app (for the trial period), you must first refresh the receipt to identify if the trial period has already been availed by the same App store user earlier. If the receipt validation tells that, you must prompt them that the trial period has already been availed for the current app store user.

P.S: In this situation even if you were fine offering the trial period to the user with account accB, in app purchase cannot provide that as long as the user is logged in with the same Apple Id on the App store.

Answer 3

Edit: My initial answer was explaining the difference between restoring and refreshing, which wasn't answering the original question. For anyone reading who is interested, take a look this StackOverflow answer for more info.

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To answer your question: is there any reason to use refresh receipt?

Yes. Your typical flow would be a user installing your app on a new device and restoring the purchases once. At this moment in time you have all the info you need to handle that process. A process which is typically user-initiated as it prompts the user's credentials:

Include some mechanism in your app to let the user restore their purchases, such as a Restore Purchases button. Restoring purchases prompts for the user’s App Store credentials, which interrupts the flow of your app: because of this, don’t automatically restore purchases, especially not every time your app is launched.

At a later point in time you would refresh the receipt to get the latest relevant info on the auto-renewable subscription you are offering, such as the:

• Subscription Expiration Intent
• Subscription Retry Flag
• Subscription Trial Period
• Cancellation Date
• Cancellation Reason
• ...

See Receipt Fields documentation for more info on these fields.

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Useful links

• Receipt Fields
• In-App Purchase Programming Guide (Restoring Purchased Products)