Merge paid app and free app with in app purchase

Question

I have 2 application on appstore

1. Free app with in app purchase.

2. Paid app.

Now, I want to keep only one app on appstore from above options 1.Free app with in app purchase and remove the paid app. But here I want to give the app with full functionality to those user who used the paid app (Purchased the paid app).

Here my question is how can I merge these 2 app into single app which will be free and contains in app purchase by keeping the paid app user as it is ?

If anyone have any idea regarding this then please share.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I solved my problem by using the icloud. First I provided the update to both the application by doing following changes.

I used "key value store" icloud option and stored some setting on icloud just need to make sure here "iCloud Key-Value Store" value in .entitlements file (which was automatically created by XCode) in both the application is same for both the application. The setting stored here is accessible to both application and depending on the setting I identified the user and gave access to specific functionality.

Answer 2

Under iOS7, you can use Receipt Validation. Receipt Validation offers you to see information about purchasing the app and in app purchases. If it returns date before you made the app free, that means that the user paid for the app.

This will work only under iOS7.

See Receipt Validation Programming Guide

Answer 3

I too am facing this issue with a couple of my apps. I'm still looking for a good solution, but I came up a less-than-ideal solution in the meantime. You can issue an update to your paid app that will connect to a database (on your web server) and insert a row with information about the purchase (AppleID, maybe some kind of digital receipt). Then in the free version with IAPs, the same database connection can be used to see if the owner of the free app already purchased the other app. Based off of that, you can unlock the IAPs. The only problem is that this is dependent on all previous customers updating to the latest version.

As mentioned, Receipt Validation would probably be more efficient, however this isn't backwards compatible. Good luck!

Answer 4

I'm assuming you're looking to merge the purchase history on Apple's servers; you can't merge the purchase data for two bundle IDs, you'll have to devise some way of having users persist their data on a server that you control. Update your app with a login and tie that login with the purchases as user has made.

The workflow would be something like this:

1) User logs in on paid app
2) User restores purchase history
3) Paid app saves restored purchase history to your server
4) User logs in on free app
5) Free app downloads all purchase data for the logged in user