Apple has told its developer community that it will help them retain subscribers beginning in the summer. If an auto-renewable subscription doesn’t renew due to a billing issue, customers will be presented with a sheet to let them update their payment method. What’s nice is that the sheet will be shown within the app so customers have fewer obstacles to resuming their subscriptions.
According to Apple, developers won’t need to take action for the system-provided sheet to appear in their app. If developers want to familiarize themselves with the sheet, they can do so in Sandbox. They can test delaying or suppressing the sheet using messages or display in StoreKit if they don’t want it to appear. For developers that are happy with the change, their users must be on iOS 16.4 or iPadOS 16.4 for the sheet to appear.
Apple also notes that the new sheet that appears will be quite intelligent too. As an example, the company says that if the subscription is in the billing retry state, Apple uses machine learning to optimize payment retries to increase the chances of success.
Developers that want to learn more about the sheet should check out the documentation page. If you want to test billing issues in Sandbox, check out this webpage for more information.