Apple's New Policy Regarding Directing Users to Your Website

Hi @Mike Davis,

We’ve compiled our initial thoughts in this blog post here: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/apple-vs-epic-supreme-court-ruling/ it goes through the basics of what’s required to implement external purchases with Apple (spoiler alert, it’s quite a lot) and an analysis of what that means for mobile app developers. Let me know if you have any questions about it!

Thanks, @sharif.  Having read through Apple’s policy updates, I came to the same conclusion as the blog article - Apple is only giving lip service to allowing developers to direct users to make purchases on their websites.  It’s not at all practical to follow the guidelines that Apple has issued.

What we have been doing, and will continue to do, is allowing users to make purchases for in-app content on our website, but we don’t direct users to do so from within our app.  Instead, our marketing (email, social, advertising, etc.) directs users to our site where they can make purchases that show up in the app.  Or, if the user prefers, they can make purchases in-app through Apple (or Google, in the case of our Android app).  The user has the choice, and we are in compliance with Apple because there is no content that is available for purchase on our site which isn’t also available for purchase inside the app.

Maybe Apple will update their policy to make it easier for developers to direct users to make purchases on websites, but only if they are forced to by the courts.

@Mike Davis happy to help! I’ve seen many developers use your strategy successfully, I see no issue continuing down that path.

I know this is an old thread, but is there any guidelines around messaging without linking? So if I just say “save x% by purchasing from website.com” without the physical link. Understand it might not get a lot of traction, but curious.

​@samantha-hochstein-afd595, I don’t have any definitive answer for you, but I will say that you could certainly give it a try and see what Apple says.  It seems that their app submission review process is a little bit of a roll of the dice.  Depending on who ends up doing the review, they might flag something like that as a violation of their policy, or they might let it go.  Worth a shot, maybe?

Hi ​@samantha-hochstein-afd595 we usually recommend not mentioning it at all even without a direct link as Apple will most likely view that as a violation of their policy.