Am I confused? Didn't Marco blog about this last year[1] and then Steve Jobs replied to someone's email saying, quote, "We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps.
Sent from my iPhone".
Did Marco forgot about this, or did he decide to try and slip it through anyway?
Alas, unfortunately it's not that cut and dry. We're SaaS, and were able to get through 4 or 5 releases of our app without Apple seeming to care about our model. Eventually we got a rejection stating that our application would be pulled if we didn't remove a reference to our website from the app (we can collect payment information on our website if you log in with an account you've created on the phone). The app reviewer stated that we should look into implementing IAP subscriptions.
Since we didn't want to confuse our customers by giving them no information on how to subscribe, and the app store is a valuable marketing channel, we decided to implement auto-renewable IAP subscriptions per Apple's recommendation and documentation but got rejected for having the wrong purchasability type. We then had to go implement non-renewable subscriptions (which are more complicated and provide a worse user experience, in my opinion) and got approved for sale.
One of our developers filed a bug report with Apple about the documentation regarding purchasability types and received a response that they would improve it. I guess I'm fine with sharing revenue with Apple if they make it really easy for users to subscribe (which IAP certainly does), but it'd be nice to understand the Right Way from the beginning.
Did Marco forgot about this, or did he decide to try and slip it through anyway?
[1]http://www.marco.org/2011/02/22/subscription-rule-not-for-sa...