We recently did an update to change the duration of the free promo. Here’s what happened:
- submitted app update that offered 14 day free promo in in-app test (no visible changes in the app store presentation)
- immediately after app was submitted, changed IAP free promo duration from 7 to 14 days
- When the new IAP promo was submitted it displayed the error:
Submission of IAP is still in progress. Please wait for sometime and try again.
- the last update was about 3 weeks prior so nothing was in process
- about 24 hours after the app updated went live, the IAP bug disappeared and the app was successfully submitted
- for those 24 hours the in-app text offered a 14 day free promo, but when you tried to buy you only saw a 7-day free promo
- 3 days after the initial app update, sales plummeted
- this appears to be a penalty or throttling
- now when we try to do a Featured Tile promotion it costs 3x more than before to get installs and 3-4 times less people who click install.
On a units / day basis installs fell as follows (by market)
US : -70%
CA: - 24%
UK: +1%
So the decline was different depending on the marketplace
I wrote support and they say everything is fine, but it is not fine. We did exactly the same update on a different app on the identical codebase (just the app feed api is different for different content) there was no bug in the IAP on release and 0 drop in installs after it went live and to this day.
Please manually review this situation. It appears to be related to the IAP bug.