App Store Now Allows Gifting IAPs
Apple today made a tweak to its App Store Review Guidelines, allowing developers to implement a new feature that will let iOS users purchase in-app content as a gift.
Right now, iOS users can purchase paid apps as gifts for other iOS users, but there’s no way to purchase in-app content as a gift. As more and more apps work on a free-to-try or subscription basis with various content only available through an in-app purchase, this change to the in-app purchase rules makes sense.
So I assume this feature isn’t coming to the Mac App Store anytime soon. It doesn’t even support regular gifting.
Question is whether they’re offering an official system for this or whether we have to hack together something of our own; if the latter, it would be yet another disappointing example of Apple punishing devs for offering non-consumable IAPs.
[…]
OTOH, the hopeful spin is that they’ve decided to start treating IAPs as equivalent to regular purchases (possibly after some back-end upgrades), in which case we might shortly see the two long-awaited feature requests of IAP Family Sharing + IAP for volume buyers come to pass.
Previously: Mac App Analytics Now Available in App Store Connect.
