How to make a non-consumable product available for multiple purchases through iOS in app purchasing?

Question

I have a social network with an iOS app and a website. For the purposes of illustration let's say I'm Facebook and I want to sell the ability to post on your friend's wall.

You would purchase this item once and forever be able to post on that friend's wall as much as you want, it does not expire.

You could purchase this item many times, but only once per friend.

If you purchase this ability on the iPhone app, you would also have this ability on the web app.

How do I do this using iOS in app purchases?

It's not a subscription because it does not expire or renew.

It's not a consumable item, because you do not use it up, it would be synched across devices, and it would be restored if you re-installed the app.

It's not a non-consumable product because you can purchase it multiple times (i.e. for multiple friendships).

How do I do this?

Answer 1

This doesn't appear to be possible within the bounds of Apple's in-app purchase system. If it were consumable, you wouldn't be able to restore it. And you have you manually create new in-app purchases, which then get approved by Apple, to add them, so you would have to manually create a non-consumable in-app purchase for every single user. That just isn't feasible. So I think you have to find some other way to approach this problem.

You could have a consumable purchase that adds the ability to post to an additional wall, where depending on where you buy it within the app, it'll apply to the particular wall being viewed. You can sync that with your server to see what walls that user is allowed to post on, and when the user signs in on other devices they will have access to those same walls there as well, so there is no "restoring" of purchases required, especially since you can't restore consumable purchases anyway. Now I don't know if Apple would like this approach because of how the in-app purchase would essentially be doing something different (allowing access to different walls) depending on which wall you're viewing, but it's the only way I can see it working within Apple's current setup for in-app purchases.