Ask HN: Apple App Store Denial Because of Apple Pay

6 pointsby 0dj0bz6 miesięcy temu4 comments

We have an app that we're getting ready to release. It is a web-first app where users register for the application and purchase their subscriptions via the web app. We are also developing browser extensions for all of the major browser platforms, including Safari. We are also going to have an iOS app.

Apple has denied our browser extension because we do not support Apple Pay for in-app purchases of "premium content". To be clear, the only "in-app" purchases that we have are the subscription to the platform, which is carried out only on the web app, not in the other planned platforms.

There are many applications in the Apple App Store (e.g., Dropbox, etc.) that have mobile apps and browser extensions and use their web app as the platform for initiating and maintaining subscriptions and the iOS / Safari extensions only allow access to those services. What are we missing in presenting this to Apple for approval? I don't want to end up with the mess that LinkedIn has where you can purchase a subscription as an in-app purchase via the iOS app and the subscription becomes completely unmaintainable outside of the Apple ecosystem.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

4 comments

Nextgrid6 miesięcy temu

> the subscription becomes completely unmaintainable outside of the Apple ecosystem.

Are they complaining about Apple Pay or in-app purchases?

Apple Pay works like a normal card payment and any good payment processor should offer easy-to-use scripts to support this. It works on the web (on Apple devices) and will work seamlessly in a web view. There is no extra fee and you still retain full control of the customer relationship.

In-app-purchases is the one where the payment goes through Apple. It seems like they're not asking for that currently for your browser extension, but keep in mind they will likely do insist on it for the actual iOS app, so plan ahead.

0dj0bz6 miesięcy temu

They are requiring us to implement Apple Pay as the only mechanism for signing up for an app subscription, even though there is no mechanism in the Safari extension to sign up. It seems like they want us to get rid of the links in the extension to take them to the web app to register and pay for the service, which would require it to almost be its own "Apple" version of the system. When we ask for clarification, we get the same boilerplate response no matter what we ask.

Nextgrid6 miesięcy temu

If they just want Apple Pay in the extension app can't you have your app embed the account management & subscription UI in a webview?

0dj0bz6 miesięcy temu

To be clear, even our iOS app doesn't currently have a mechanism to sign up for the service; we reserve that for the website. On there, we support Apple Pay as a payment method via Stripe.

My fear is that they are going to try to force us to implement in-app purchases for the iOS app to register for the service, which I don't like because I just don't.