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I am selling apps on monthly payment plans to external companies. If they decide to stop paying the subscription fee is there any way I can remove or disable the app on the customers device?

Can I for example use Google App Engine, read in a value and check to see if 'Valid' or not. Would this pass the app store review process?


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closed as off-topic by Abizern, Monolo, jaypal singh, Matthew Strawbridge, p.s.w.g Jun 29 '13 at 19:18


What about In-App subscriptions? Or can you simply stop pushing the non-payers the content? Have you investigated the B2B VPP as it may also offer you some solutions. –  Robotic Cat Jul 22 '12 at 18:35
This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about programming –  Abizern Jun 29 '13 at 15:16

3 Answers 3

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This is how I interpret your situation:

You have several customers, lets say company A and company B and you are making an app to both of them. To make and host these apps they both pay you a monthly fee.

Suddenly company B stops paying the fee and you wish to remove app B from the app store and render it unusable for all devices having the app installed.

You could do something like this:

  1. Remove app B from appstore by removing it from sale in iTunesConnect
  2. Whenever anyone opens any of your apps (app A or B) you let the app connect to a web server that you are hosting, to see if it should still be available.
  3. You could make sure that you don't make the check unless some time has passed since the last check.
  4. If the network is not available when you are making the check, do the check at a later time and let the user use the app as normal.
  5. If the check is successful and you find out that the app is no longer valid, give the user an error message and stop showing the app's contents.

As for the review process, I don't see any problem rendering the app unusable, as long as you remove the app from sale on the App Store as well.

About the subscription thing, what Apple regulates is the subscriptions made by the app users, not by the company to who you are selling the app to. You can charge them in any way you like.

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This is a very detailed answer jake, and it sums up my problem perfectly. This is exactly the senario that I hoped for, if the company that commissioned the app (who pay me a monthly subscription) decides to stop I would like to remove the app from the store and disable the existing apps. –  Don Tommy Jul 23 '12 at 18:46
I understood the question completely differently, now I get what you were asking :) –  Stavash Jul 24 '12 at 5:28

Apple will probably not reject your application for having a "self destruct" mechanism, but once they find out you've been utilizing this, they will most definitely pull you out of the App Store for 2 reasons:

  1. Your application is now useless to some people which is not acceptable.
  2. You've been selling subscriptions indirectly and not through Apple.
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I didnt realise you can not sell subscriptions only through apple, I assumed other companies were all doing the same. I will investigate this subscription method. –  Don Tommy Jul 22 '12 at 18:37
This kind of depends, you are not selling subscriptions to the users, you are selling them to the app's owners, right? So you charge a monthly fee from the "owner" of the app, but you are not charging the user, correct? From what I know Apple don't give interfer with the way you get pay for manufacturing the app, only the way the end user pays for it. –  jake_hetfield Jul 23 '12 at 12:49
Also about comment 1, if you are making one app per subscribing customer, this is not an issue, if the customer stops paying then you will remove the app from the appstore and you no longer will have useless apps published there. –  jake_hetfield Jul 23 '12 at 12:51

If your app is for your targeted users, why not use logins? If you've already have logins, then you can disable their account at any time. If you wanna go more complicated, you can also create web services and whenever they log in, check their UUID. In this way, you can ban them either on their accounts or their UUIDs. Ban on their UUID could be useful to protect their information if they lose their devices.

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I would like to avoid logins at all costs, I hate when you download and app and it forces you to sign in. –  Don Tommy Jul 23 '12 at 18:49
It is pretty annoying but it is pretty effective to protect both you and the clients. I have an app let them sign in any time but they also could set it up to do automatically log in. –  Raymond Wang Jul 23 '12 at 20:03
