Apple unveiled a new feature that will allow iOS users to resolve billing issues in-app, saving a step with subscription renewals.
One of the main benefits of the App Store is that it saves developers the trouble of dealing with billing and subscriptions. Unfortunately, when billing issues arise and subscriptions don’t renew, it hasn’t always been clear how customers should go about addressing it.
Apple is making the process a little easier, giving customers a way to change their billing information and fix any issues without leaving the app.
Soon it will be easier than ever for your customers to resolve payment issues, so they can stay subscribed to your content, services, and premium features. Starting this summer, if an auto-renewable subscription doesn’t renew due to a billing issue, a system-provided sheet appears in your app with a prompt that lets customers update their payment method for their Apple ID. No action is required to adopt this feature. Starting today, you can get familiar with the sheet in Sandbox. You can also test delaying or suppressing it using messages and display in StoreKit. This feature will require a minimum of iOS 16.4 or iPadOS 16.4.
All of this adds to existing powerful App Store features that help you retain subscribers. For example, if a subscription is in the billing retry state, Apple uses machine learning to optimize payment retries for the best possible recovery rate. And when you enable Billing Grace Period, customers can continue accessing their subscriptions while Apple attempts to collect payment.
The announcement is good news for iOS developers and customers alike and solves one more pain point for developers.
