Does Apple test purchase of physical goods during their app approval process?

Question

If I'm creating an app that:

• Facilitates the purchase of physical items
• Does not use IAP for payment of these items
• Uses a webview pointing to the app's web site to complete a purchase

Will Apple expect to be able to complete a purchase using our web-view, or will they be satisfied to see that they can queue physical items from the app in a cart and see that it's been handed off to a web view?

Answer 1

Update for anyone watching and who might come across this in the future. Our app was approved first-try by Apple and maybe took at most an hour.

Detailed

Barring any changes to Apple's policy in the future or how they're influenced by the phase of the moon; As of the date of this answer, I'm confident in asserting the following about Apple's take on in-app purchasing:

• If you are selling digital content, you must use IAP
• If you are selling physical goods, you cannot use IAP

tl;dr

Apple's requirements, restrictions and testing of an App featuring physical purchases are no more stringent than one without.

Answer 2

From review guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guidelines.html#purchasing-currencies

Hmm this may be a bit of a grey area, there is

11.3 Apps using IAP to purchase physical goods or goods and services used outside of the App will be rejected

If they translate IAP as 'In App Purchase' i.e. purchasing something 'inside the app'. You may be best to redirect the user to 'Safari' to complete the transaction and not do it 'in app'.

Also:

11.13 Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the App, such as a "buy" button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected

Again, not exact as you mention you are selling physical goods.

I'd say it's not an outright rejection based on those but it's risky ... Try it and let us know ?

Answer 3

The key here is that you're facilitating the purchase of a physical product, not something intended to be used within the application.

Based on the fact that Fandango allows you to purchase movie tickets in app without using Apple's IAP mechanism, I would think you're on fairly safe ground. Then again, as noted, Apple's approval process can sometimes be rather fickle, so ymmv.

I would suspect that you may get declined initially, but if you protest and point that out you'll probably be successful. It might save you the round trip discussion if you point it out very prominently in the notes to reviewer section when you submit the application.

Answer 4

The question is not about will or won't the app get approved because it includes a payment integration but rather;

Will apple reviewers expect to test the end-to-end payment process works as intended?

Although I can't give a definitive answer as to whether they will or not. I would assume that if it is functionality of your app then expect that it may be tested. Therefore it may be worth adding some dummy items for minimal prices (which you can inform them of) in case they want to test. It's their money.

If you flip it round - if they didn't test the functionality then there would be approved apps that may not work as expected or be buggy and that would equal unhappy punters.

As long as you make them aware of the dummy items and that they are there for approval testing only (and will be removed on completion of the approval process) then you're covered if they decide to test or not.