Testing IAP subscription when renewed from iTunes or App Store app

Question

I've been implementing auto-renewing In App Purchases and, using the info found here, have had little trouble the purchasing, renewing, & restoring transaction flows.

The problem I am having is finding a way to test when a user renews (after, presumably, canceling some time in the past) from their account page in either iTunes or the App Store app (Detailed here). I'm assuming, since those exist outside of the sandbox and when you log into one of them using a sandbox account that account is invalidated as a test account, there is no way to actually test this use case so I'm just looking for more information on the expected behavior to try and account for it.

I know that keeping a copy of the receipt around to validate will give the latest receipt as part of the JSON payload, I'm more curious for information on how StoreKit will handle this renewal. Will paymentQueue: updatedTransaction: fire with a new SKPaymentTransaction as soon as I add a TransactionObserver or will it stay silent until calling restoreCompletedTransactions and then the new SKPaymentTransaction will be part of that?

Answer 1

Yes, you are correct; paymentQueue:updatedTransactions: will fire, just as if you were making the initial subscription purchase.

You can actually test this since renewals within the sandbox kick in at a much faster pace (up to six times a day) as explained here (scroll down to the bottom under "The Test Environment").

Also when you verify the transaction with Apple's verification service right after you made a test subscription purchase, look for the expires_date field in the response, it will tell you when the next renewal will be triggered.