Can I give my iPhone App customers referral credits for signing up new subscription customers

In an app that is free, but has in-app subscription purchases I would like to开发者_如何学JAVA allow a user with a paid subscription to receive x number of free months on top of the paid subscription if he refers someone that purchases a subscription.

For this to work it would have to be possible to track some sort of unique token through the Apple App Store in order to reliably assign credits.

To "Refer a friend" the app would allow the user to send an email to one or more people. This email would contain a link to the app store that also contains a unique key that I would generate to track the lead.

Is this possible?

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Our app just got rejected yesterday regarding this kind of functionality.

We had an application which includes yearly subscriptions to access premium features. We also had a way for users to refer 5 friends to get a free access for life to our services. Apple rejected the app stating that this was against their rules for IAP.

Specifically, they referred us to the section 11.1 of the guideline which states :

Apps that unlock or enable additional features or functionality with mechanisms other than the App Store will be rejected

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Unfortunately, apple doesn't offer that functionality. One option is to offer 2 different subscriptions - paid and free.

Hide the free subscription portal until they refer someone - then allow them to see the free subscription option.

A couple problems:

1. The user will have to manually cancel auto-renew on their current paid subscription and then manually sign up for the free subscription.
2. I don't think you will be able to disable auto-renew on the free subscription option, so it would probably end up being permanent.

You could skip the free subscription official IAP and just make your own time-limited "back door" letting the customer continue downloading subscription content without verifying their App Store receipt. This would still have problem (1) above with the customer needing to manually cancel their auto-renew and then repurchase the subscription when their free time runs out.

My gut tells me this is going to be REALLY hard to pull off in a satisfactory way.

It would be much easier to reward one-time exclusive content for referrals. E.g. Give X for the first, Y after 5 referrals, Z after 10 referrals, etc. This is actually an easier value proposition to present to the users too; make a nice icon or something with an "Invite Friends to Unlock!" call to action.