Apple’s new tip will help people resolve any issues with paying for revolving subscriptions on their iPhone or iPad, right in the app itself.
- Apple will soon let you update your payment method right in the app if an auto-renewing subscription fails due to a billing issue.
- Prior to this change, billing issues had to be resolved manually if the user knew how to access their Apple ID payment settings.
- Apps optimized for iOS and iPadOS 16.4 will automatically display this prompt if an auto-renewing subscription fails due to a billing issue.
Solve billing issues for iPhone subscriptions
The goal is to renew the failed subscription as painlessly as possible. In iOS 16.3 and earlier, an app would throw a cryptic error message if its paid features couldn’t be accessed due to a billing issue. This usually occurs when there is insufficient funds on the user’s associated payment method.
In turn, this led to confusion for less experienced users who didn’t know where to update the theistic payment method. According to an announcement on the Apple Developer website, apps using the Apple StoreKit platform and compiled for at least iOS or iPadOS 16.4 will automatically get this feature.
“Starting this summer, if an auto-renewing subscription doesn’t renew due to a billing issue, a system-provided prompt sheet will appear in your app to allow customers to update their Apple ID payment method,”it says.
Developers can also define a grace period for payments so that features blocked for a revolving subscription remain active while Apple’s billing system attempts to receive payment. Apple even uses machine learning to fix payment failures in the least disruptive way.
For example, if a subscription is in a billing retry state, Apple Machine Learning will optimize the billing retries for the fastest recovery possible.