What’s new
Use the latest capabilities to improve the discovery of your app on the App Store, and deliver high-quality app and in-app purchase experiences.
App Store: expanded pricing upgrades
The following capabilities are now available for all purchase types, including paid apps and one-time in-app purchases.
- More flexible price points. Choose from 900 price points — nearly 10 times the number of price points previously available for most apps. These options also offer more flexibility, increasing incrementally across price ranges (for example, every $0.10 up to $10, every $0.50 between $10 and $50, etc.).
- Enhanced global pricing. Use globally equalized prices that follow the most common pricing conventions in each country or region, so you can provide pricing that’s more relevant to customers. For example, €15.49 becomes €14.99.
- Worldwide options for base price. Specify a country or region of your choosing as the basis for globally equalized prices across the other 174 storefronts and 43 currencies for paid apps and one-time in-app purchases. Prices you set for this base storefront won’t be adjusted by Apple to account for taxes or foreign currency changes, and you’ll be able to set prices for each storefront if you prefer.
- Regional options for availability. Define the availability of in-app purchases and subscriptions by region, so you can deliver content and services customized for each market.
App Analytics: peer group benchmarks now available
Put your app’s performance into context using peer group benchmarks, which compare your app’s performance to that of similar apps on the App Store. Peer group benchmarks provide powerful new insights across the customer journey, enabling you to identify what works well in your app and what can be improved. Apps are placed into groups based on their App Store category, business model, and download volume to ensure relevant comparisons. Using industry-leading differential privacy techniques, peer group benchmarks provide relevant and actionable insights — all while keeping the performance of individual apps private.
Billing Grace Period: new configurability options
You can now choose to apply Billing Grace Period only to existing paid renewals, or continue applying it to all subscription renewals (existing paid renewals and free offers transitioning to paid renewals). You can also choose a duration of 3, 16, or 28 days instead of having the duration predefined based on your subscription length. When you enable Billing Grace Period in App Store Connect, Apple tries to address any subscriber billing issues and recover the subscription while subscribers retain access to subscription benefits. If the subscription is recovered within this period, there’s no interruption to the days of paid service or to your revenue.
App Store: pricing upgrades
Leverage 700 additional price points and new pricing tools that will make it easier to set prices per App Store storefront, manage foreign exchange rate changes, and more.
Game Center: more ways to promote engagement
Game Center, Apple’s social gaming network, lets you bring even more fun and connection to your games. Now players can find out what’s happening in your games and connect with friends around their activities.
Redesigned dashboard. Achievements and leaderboard standings are featured more prominently on the dashboard in your games, and the dashboard now includes a feed with friends’ in-game activity. Players can also see this activity on their Game Center profile, as well as friends’ profiles.
Push notifications. Players can receive push notifications about leaderboard activity — such as when someone passes their score — so they can stay on top of the latest activity in your game and remain engaged.
Add friends via Contacts. In Contacts, contact cards of Game Center friends include a link to their profile, and people can tap a button to invite other contacts to be friends too.
SharePlay. With SharePlay support, players can automatically join a game with friends from a Group FaceTime call.
SKAdNetwork: more data
SKAdNetwork and Private Click Measurement let advertisers attribute their advertising across multiple sources — all while maintaining user privacy. SKAdNetwork 4.0 includes support for:
Coarse conversion values. These values give advertisers more flexibility and additional attribution information while maintaining privacy protections.
Multiple conversions. Advertisers can receive postbacks for multiple conversion windows, so the advertiser and ad network can better understand how much someone who installed the advertised app engages with it over time.
SKAdNetwork for web ads. Advertisers can attribute web-based ads in Safari that direct to the advertised app’s App Store product page after a user taps an ad.
StoreKit 2: new APIs and properties
Updates to StoreKit 2 make supporting in-app purchases and subscriptions even easier.
AppTransaction API. Securely authenticate your app purchase details, check the dates people pre-ordered your app, and make sure customers maintain access to their purchased content if you switch from a paid to a freemium business model.
Minimum requirements: iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, tvOS 16, watchOS 9
StoreKit Message API. Control when StoreKit message sheets appear in your app, so you don’t interrupt a user during a critical moment.
Minimum requirements: iOS 16, iPadOS 16
SwiftUI APIs. Present offer code redemption sheets and request App Store reviews within your app.
Offer Code Redemption API minimum requirements: iOS 16, iPadOS 16
Request Review API minimum requirements: iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13
New properties. Take advantage of new fields, such as environment and recentSubscriptionStartDate.
Minimum requirements: iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS 12, tvOS 15, watchOS 8 built with Xcode 14 or later
In-app purchases: enhanced testing
Test additional in-app purchase scenarios in the sandbox environment and Xcode to ensure your app properly handles them in production.
Sync in Xcode. Sync in-app purchase products from App Store Connect to Xcode more easily, so you can stay focused on development.
Minimum requirement: Xcode 14
Test in Xcode. Test offer code redemptions, refund requests, and price increases. You can even simulate billing retry and grace period scenarios.
Minimum requirement: Xcode 13.3
Sandbox. Add sandbox testers more easily, and take advantage of support for testing billing retry, payment failure, and recovery scenarios. Enhancements coming later this year to the App Store Connect API let you test certain scenarios using the sandbox environment.
App Store Server Notifications V2
App Store Server Notifications V2 provides near real-time updates on your in-app purchase transactions, so you can create customized experiences for your users. A new notification type, TEST, lets you confirm that your server is ready to receive server notifications in the sandbox environment and production.
App Store Server API: improved testing and processing
New enhancements to the App Store Server API help you test receiving notifications from App Store Server Notifications V2, get the latest transaction information, and more easily process transaction data.
Request test notifications. Confirm that your server is ready to receive notifications from App Store Server Notifications in the sandbox environment and production by requesting a TEST notification be sent to your server.
Notification history. Get the history of notifications sent for your app by App Store Server Notifications V2. This helps ensure your customer records are up to date if your server experiences an outage.
In-app purchase history. Get the history of in-app purchase transactions for your app. Now with new sort and filter options, you can retrieve the most recently modified transactions first or filter by fields such as product type, product ID, purchase date, and more.
Available in the sandbox environment and production.
Benchmarks in App Analytics
Compare your app’s performance to similar apps on the App Store with benchmarks, included in App Analytics. Benchmarks provide valuable insights across the customer journey by putting performance metrics related to acquisition, usage, and monetization into context — so you can easily see how you’re performing compared to your peers and make decisions to achieve your business goals. Peer groups are created using the latest differential privacy techniques to ensure that confidential information is kept safe and private.
Available early 2023.
Subscription price notifications: improved user experience
When you increase the price of an auto-renewable subscription, Apple provides email, push notifications, and in-app messaging to let subscribers know about upcoming changes and how to manage their subscriptions, or cancel if they prefer. Now under certain specific conditions and with advance user notice, you may also offer an auto-renewable subscription price increase, without the user needing to take action and without interrupting the service.