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We are in the process of trying to get approved in the App Store submission process, but have faced a rejection due to a payment failure when the reviewer attempted to subscribe. While testing the payment process, we have encountered the following errors: 

“The receipt is not valid. The purchased product was missing in the receipt. This is typically due to a bug in StoreKit.” 

and 

“There was a problem with the App Store.”

Are these issues associated with the Apple Sandbox environment when testing payment? From a bit of research, this seems to be the case. If so, how can we be approved by Apple if the only way to demonstrate the functionality of payments is by testing in Sandbox mode? In the review process, we received the following information: 

 

 

When validating receipts on your server, your server needs to be able to handle a production-signed app getting its receipts from Apple’s test environment. The recommended approach is for your production server to always validate receipts against the production App Store first. If validation fails with the error code "Sandbox receipt used in production," you should validate against the test environment instead.

 

How can we achieve this setup with Revenuecat?

 If what I’ve provided thus far is insufficient, what further information is needed to diagnose the problem?

 Thank you for your help.

Everyone is facing the same issue, even my app is rejected by Apple due to same reason and apparently there is no recourse.

Hey There,

 

Unfortunately, Apple’s sandbox environment is notoriously flaky - there are regular outages and sometimes purchases can get hung up in their system. Even worse is that Apple’s reviewers use this unstable environment for App Review, which can cause issues when the reviewer tests in-app purchases like subscriptions. I would recommend re-submitting your app for review (some developers have submitted the same binary up to a dozen times before getting through).

 

Their "Next Steps" is unfortunately a generic message that doesn't apply to RevenueCat since we always validate against the production App Store first, as they recommend.

 

Just to clarify, there's nothing you as a developer or RevenueCat can do to resolve these errors except retrying later/resubmitting. The good news is that this typically only happens when an app is being launched for the first time- subsequent updates typically work as expected for the reviewer.

 

This can also be a case of forgetting to include products with review, or even an App Store outage that can affect sandbox purchases. If your app is working in sandbox mode while testing on your own devices, this is likely an issue with the App Store.

 

I recommend taking a look at our docs page geared toward App Store rejections, and feel free to follow up with any additional questions you may have.

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