Apple today rolled out a new subscription retention tool for developers looking to reduce cancellations. Here are the details.
Retention messages now available to developers
During WWDC earlier this year, Apple announced Retention Messaging, a new feature that lets developers display personalized messages and special offers to users as they attempt to cancel their subscriptions.
Now, as the company explained in a new post on its developer blog, the feature is available, allowing developers to configure messages that “appear in the cancellation flow and can include text, images, or a special offer.”
If this sounds familiar, that’s because this is not Apple’s first attempt to help developers reduce cancellations.
In 2024, Apple announced Win-Back Offers, which allowed developers to offer discounts to former subscribers in an effort to bring them back.
What’s different about the new Retention Messaging feature is that it allows developers to reach subscribers before they complete the cancellation process, rather than after they’ve already canceled their subscriptions or let them expire.
Here’s Apple on how developers can configure these messages:
In App Store Connect, you can configure retention messages for your auto-renewable subscriptions, including subscriber eligibility and the wait time between messages. With the Retention Messaging API, you can choose which message to show each subscriber based on their subscription details. API access is available by request.
Apple’s documentation notes that developers can create up to 10 retention messages per app, each associated with one or more subscriptions.
To learn more about retention messages, follow this link.
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