Backend: iOS subscriptions not coming through reliably

[samuelclay]

We need to figure out how to fix iOS subscriptions in that they are not always going through to the servers. See this thread: https://forum.newsblur.com/t/subscription-renewal-ios-not-coming-through/8764/6

I'm not sure what to do about it. We should probably add logic to confirm if the subscription was sent to the NB servers and received a 200 status code. If not, log it and then hit a different url? I have no idea what to do, but I am noticing that even users who have a couple years of successful payments will sometimes fall through the cracks and have this year's payment not sent to the server.

[made2k]

I was one of the reporters in that thread so I may be able to provide more info here. I tried searching through the code base to get context on how subscriptions are handled. I see that the PremiumManager.m class will send the receipt to the server's save_ios_receipt endpoint upon the completion of the purchase client side. This makes sense to me as an initial purchase. But I couldn't find where the auto renewal handling code was at.

How or where is that handled? I was looking for some common notification_type handlers for Apple's server to server notifications but didn't see any. For reference, I did initially subscribe via the iOS application and have kept that subscription active. However, I use another RSS client to hook in to the NewsBlur service so the NewsBlur application is not installed on my phone any longer.

[Dejal]

It sounds like the issue is unrelated to the iOS app; a server-to-server communication of the subscription renewal.