{"id":23244,"date":"2018-10-29T16:30:45","date_gmt":"2018-10-29T20:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=23244"},"modified":"2018-11-13T15:26:30","modified_gmt":"2018-11-13T20:26:30","slug":"business-licensing-for-omnis-ios-apps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/29\/business-licensing-for-omnis-ios-apps\/","title":{"rendered":"Business Licensing for Omni&rsquo;s iOS Apps"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.omnigroup.com\/blog\/business-licensing-for-omnis-ios-apps\">Ken Case<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.omnigroup.com\/blog\/business-licensing-for-omnis-ios-apps\">\n<p>In 2016, we started switching our apps over to free downloads with in-app purchases. This solved a lot of problems for consumers who purchase our apps through the App Store, by enabling free trials, upgrade discounts, and free upgrades for recent purchases. Unfortunately, switching to in-app purchases made it much more difficult for businesses and schools to purchase our apps through the App Store, since Apple&rsquo;s Volume Purchase Program (which lets organizations purchase apps) doesn&rsquo;t support in-app purchases.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Looking around at how other people have solved this problem, one of the better approaches is to offer a single sign-on based licensing solution. (This is an approach Microsoft supports <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/download\/details.aspx?id=42041\">for licensing Office 365<\/a>, for example.) The idea is that an organization will purchase licenses for use by a team, and the app will offer to let team members sign in with a set of credentials which will be verified by that organization <a href=\"https:\/\/auth0.com\/blog\/how-saml-authentication-works\/\">using their single sign-on server<\/a>. This lets the organization be responsible for purchasing and distributing their team&rsquo;s licenses&mdash;including redistributing licenses when appropriate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>So, in other words, licensing has to completely bypass the App Store. I guess Apple allows this because you can still purchase in-app. But there must be restrictions or else we would already see a parallel app economy with discounts and upgrades purchased directly from the developer.<\/p>\n\n<p id=\"business-licensing-for-omnis-ios-apps-update-2018-11-13\">Update (2018-11-13): <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/kcase\/status\/1062361386745913344\">Ken Case<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/kcase\/status\/1062361386745913344\">\n<p>To be clear, we do offer IAP. Unfortunately, IAP doesn&rsquo;t support business purchases (which I filed a few years ago as radar 29148022). Before implementing this option, we had no mechanism for businesses to purchases licenses at all (they could only reimburse personal purchases).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ken Case: In 2016, we started switching our apps over to free downloads with in-app purchases. This solved a lot of problems for consumers who purchase our apps through the App Store, by enabling free trials, upgrade discounts, and free upgrades for recent purchases. Unfortunately, switching to in-app purchases made it much more difficult for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-10-29T20:30:47Z","apple_news_api_id":"df243f71-8620-4b7f-8697-3ed7ae4ad612","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2018-11-13T20:26:35Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/A3yQ_cYYgS3-Glz7XrkrWEg","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[91,101,522,31,1610,72],"class_list":["post-23244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-appstore","tag-business","tag-inapppurchase","tag-ios","tag-ios-12","tag-omnigroup"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23365,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23244\/revisions\/23365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}