Transfer iOS app which has In-App subscriptions

Question

So I have a bit of a dilemma here... I need to transfer an app from an iTunes Connect (ITC) account of another organization to the ITC account of my own organization.

But the problem here is that the app in question has In-App Subscriptions associated with it and Apple does not allow transfer of apps that have In-App Subscriptions (or have ever had these subscriptions).

As such, I am proposing a round-about method of doing this transfer:

1. Create a new minor version of the existing app so that we can provide the current user-base with some useful information about our intended roll out of the new app

2. Release this version under the old ITC account (obviously), and version it as a minor version

3. Create a new app in the new ITC account and name it {oldAppName}-Test or something similar

4. Get this new "Test" app ready for production by going through various rounds of QA and internal testing

5. Reject the current app in the old ITC account and proceed to Delete the old app when we are ready to take the new app to production (this frees up the app name for use by other ITC accounts)

6. Once the current app is deleted, we can rename our {oldAppName}-Test to {oldAppName} and release it to App Store

Granted, this method is in no way an actual transfer because all associated data and history will be lost with the app deletion, but we really only need to take over the app and it's name, so that we can offer a totally re-written product under the same name.

We are moving away from the In-App Subscriptions revenue model to a different revenue model, so the subscriptions data and history are of no concern for us going forward.

However, I cannot help but feel that this is a very rough approach.

Does anyone have any suggestions regarding this? Or hopefully a cleaner way for me to do this?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer in this regard.

Answer 1

This has changed in June 2017:

Apps that offer subscriptions can now be transferred between developer accounts. If your app offers non-renewing or free subscriptions, you can transfer your app as described in App transfer overview

If your app offers auto-renewable subscriptions or uses a shared secret, you'll need to generate an app-specific shared secret for your app before you transfer it. Learn more

Answer 2

Unfortunately, you are right. This is pretty much the only way to go about this, as Apple specifically says:

The app can’t offer (or have previously offered) In-App Purchase subscriptions: auto-renewable, free, or non-renewing.

In the transferring criteria.

Your method sounds like the best way to go about it, however you could still try to email developer support or opening a technical issue (You have two of them for free every membership year) to see if they may be able to help you out.

Other than that I would just suggest you try to change the app name of the existing app to something slightly different, so that you can use it again on the new account. Then in the update you prepare have a hidden screen saying something like: We're moving to a new home. Download the new app here(link). My UX personality is now forcing me to tell you to use a solid background color with white or black text on top of it. At the end of the page you may include a link to your website that tells the reader why you are making this switch (if you want to.) You can the just remotely trigger the change from hidden to visible via code (Push Notification or Server Side Query or Countdown) that will then redirect the readers to the new app.

Hope that helped you in any way, even tough that you're in a tough sitaution here.

Julian