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Does anyone understand how Patreon can work with Apple’s in-app purchase system? When an in-app purchase is made, only Apple knows about it. Doesn’t Patreon need to know who has signed up for what creator? Did Apple add some new capability to in-app purchases to enable this? 
@provuejim Uninformed: many apps use IAP to purchase “currency”. So that is possible. Currently, the Patreon app just offers me an Apple Pay (and other methods) web view.
@provuejim as I understand it, this whole kerfuffle with Patreon is all about subscriptions and in app purchases made within the Patreon app. Until now, I guess Apple was not charging Patreon the 30% for the in-app purchase.
I was unaware that people actually use the Patreon app instead of the website, but the controversy made much more sense after that detail clicked.
Using the mobile app is probably a lot more convenient for users than going to the website.
@provuejim I assume it would be like what Omni does, where they would add the purchases to your Patreon account, which the app is signed into. But I don’t understand how things would work at the SKU level, though. Would Apple know which creators you’re supporting and give you the opportunity to manage them?
@mjtsai If the purchase goes thru Apple, then I would think of course Apple would know everything, how could they not? But my question is, how would Patreon know which creators you’re supporting?? Patreon has to get that information somehow so that they can tell the creators, so that creators can give out whatever perks they provide, which generally would be provided outside of the iOS app. Currently Apple doesn’t give developers any information about who has purchased their software, just totals by country. And Patreon would also have to find out if someone cancelled a subscription, so that they can tell the creator to stop providing perks. It seems to me that a new SDK is needed to make this work? Or is there already an SDK for this that I missed?
@provuejim @evankstone @joshrivers What I mean is, does Apple see a SKU with the detailed creator info (not great for privacy) or just the recurring amount (not great for the UI)? The subscription would be initiated within the Patreon app so they should know about new subscriptions. But, yeah, they would need a way to know about cancellations initiated from Settings. I’m not sure whether there’s a way to be notified of that if the user never runs the app again…
@mjtsai @provuejim @evankstone @joshrivers Look at Substack. Each subscription for each creator gets its own SKU. Substack’s App Store listing exposes the most popular ones:
@gruber @mjtsai @provuejim @evankstone @joshrivers That looks like a very large custom thing hiding behind this to deal with Apple's nonsense ...
@Mutesplash @gruber @mjtsai @provuejim @evankstone @joshrivers It feels like a particularly janky thing when you look at something like X, too, where each account’s subscription is its own SKU. I don’t know about now, but the App Store used to allow only some maximum number of SKUs (off the top of my head, maybe 10,000?).
@gruber @mjtsai @provuejim @joshrivers Seeing that, it's all starting to make sense now.
In the App Store API docs, one of the main topics is “Managing in-app purchases” with subtopics of “Create your in-app purchase” and “Manage pricing for your in-app purchase”.
So it looks like we (and Patreon and Substack) can dynamically create in-app purchases via the API, which would make very easy the building out of those subscription lists and managing their pricing.
@gruber @mjtsai @provuejim @joshrivers This part of the App Store API documentation is probably more appropriate to the topic at hand since it covers auto-renewable subscriptions.
But it's interesting to see that's it's possible to do either through the API.
Managing auto-renewable subscriptions
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appstoreconnectapi/app_store/auto-renewable_subscriptions/managing_auto-renewable_subscriptions