RevenueCat paywall assets (images/icons) fail to load for users in Russia

RevenueCat team, please respond – this is critical issue. Users in Russia are already having issues with Apple Pay, and images failing to load are driving conversion even lower

Also in Russia not work revenuecat subscriptions and purchases, it happen after russian block cloudflare services, many sites on cloudflare not work also. It is critical issue!

Hi all, I am Alejandro from the Infrastructure team at RevenueCat.

We’re trying to debug these blocks happen, trying to setup some fallback mechanisms as well as working to find a solution with our partner CDNs.

Would you be able to provide us with the ISPs where you’re seeing those blocks happen from? either the ISP name, or the ASN number (ASXXXX), which you can get by visiting i.e https://bgp.tools. 

Also, we have setup this OONI test link that will check for blocks for our domains. It would be useful if you could run it from an affected network and provide us with the results, either DM’ing me here in the forum or opening a support ticket referencing this forum thread: https://run.ooni.org/v2/10258

Alejandro, hello! Thank you for your response. I sent the ISPs and ASN details to Alejandra Wetsch

Hope we’ll figure out this issue and share the results in this thread

Hello, any updates on this?

We also started to have a lot of reports from Russia about issues with purchases.

Some seem can not trigger transaction at all, some charged by Apple but premium not activated.

Can we and is it safe to set our own custom proxy in client sdk to fix it quickly? 

Purchases.proxyURL = URL(string: "https://myproxy-which-works-in-russia.com")

Testing it from one device with gcloud seems work ok.

Or please advise what can we do.

Purchases with SDK 5.47.1 and StoreKit 2.

Hi, ​@timurk 

My current workaround is RevenueCat’s official proxy URL from (https://api.rc-backup.com/) and custom paywall (not using RevenueCat’s Paywall Builder). With this setup initial conversion has increased

Hey all,

We are working to provide with backup options for our APIs and assets to be reachable from Russia, and evaluating different alternative CDN options.

Could you try running the OONI test link now?, we have it updated with some files that should be triggering the blocks we’re observing, as well as some alternate CDN’s we’re evaluating to route the paywall assets through. https://run.ooni.org/v2/10258 -- feel free to send the results via DM or support ticket mentioning this thread.

​@timurk you are also able to set up your own reverse proxy for our APIs, but please do contact Support about it as there’s some specific details about it that need to be set.

Thank you ​@alejandro-martinez, 

I’ve opted to https://api.rc-backup.com/ for now (thank you ​@insaefoam) to see how it goes. Would you have any data indicating that it’s working reliably (or not) in Russia regarding purchases API? Wonder if I still should switch to custom proxy.

Could you try running the OONI test link now

I’m not located in Russia. But fwiw Russian network restrictions could be different per provider, locations, cellular/cable (and probably other things I'm not aware of) according to people experience.

It seems to work better, but we’re trying to implement mechanisms to better gather the reliability of both and possibly implementing checking and automatic failover on the SDK side.

The main issue with the way those specific blocks are happening is that most of the times the connection seems to get timed out within the user’s network (with DPI just dropping the TCP connection to our server after a certain amount of traffic has passed), which makes it hard to determine from our end whether the client has actually fully received the API response or not, and whether it’s a blocking problem or just bad internet connectivity on the users’ device.

Also the fact that the blocks do not appear all networks or regions in an equal way and that it’s tricky to obtain network access to a blocked network make it reproducing it and debugging from our end very tricky, but we keep trying.

Hi @timurk @insaefoam, we have rolled out a fix so that assets for users in Russia are routed through a different CDN that does not seem as affected by the ISP blocks.

Could you verify if things are working better from your apps this way?

Thank you all!

Do you rolled out for regular endpoint or for backup? I used backup url, but last days we see problems… very delays for Russias users or not working

Great to hear ​@alejandro-martinez! Is it only for CDN or regular purchases calls as well?

Right now I use purchases proxy https://api.rc-backup.com/ and don’t use RC’ remote paywalls. Should anything improve for me and do I need to make any changes?

Thanks again for working on it!

Do you have any debug logs or diagnostics about this?, would you be able to share them with us via a support ticket? - refer back to this post if you want.

The changes we did apply to both rc-backup and the normal API. If the customer is detected as coming from an IP address in Russia we’ll serve them assets from a different CDN, no changes yet if you’re not using our paywalls.