burdenofhope said:
Hello there, I also have a question regarding a transfer of licenses. A friend of mine (I'll call him "A") bought Pleco two years ago, but he neither speaks Chinese anymore nor has he used Pleco in ages. So now another friend ("B") wants to buy that license from him. Does B have to log-in into A's iTunes account in order to transfer the licenses from A's iPhone to B's iPhone. Is that possible? Thanks a lot for your help, Michael.
With iTunes purchases, at the moment that is indeed the only way to transfer your license; unfortunately, Apple has not provided any sort of system to transfer iTunes purchases between users.
We are, however, investigating how we might make purchases portable without Apple's help, using almost the same system we've used to allow for Android to iOS transfers.
The basic issue is this: when you re-purchase an in-app purchase item - i.e., buy something you've already bought before - Apple's system tells you you've already bought it and offers to let you download it again for free. If you tap "Yes," Apple generates a totally new purchase receipt - complete with a new transaction ID - and passes that along to our server. We have absolutely no way to tell that this is a re-purchase - there's not even a user ID or anything to potentially trace it back to the original purchaser - so as far as our server is concerned, it's a completely genuine / new purchase. (we think Apple may be doing this in order to make it impossible for developers to force users to re-purchase items, though I'm not quite sure how we would do that, since if they're seeing that "download again for free" prompt there's no way for them to pay us again even if we don't reinstate access to their purchases) We only find out that it was a re-purchase because Apple's daily sales report tells us that we sold fewer copies that day than the number of new purchase IDs that appeared on our server.
Hence, all iTunes purchase transactions have to be treated as potentially suspicious - they may be a re-purchase or they may be a new original purchase, but since we don't know, we can't allow users to arbitrarily transfer them to other devices. Otherwise, a single user could re-purchase a single copy of Pleco dozens or even hundreds of times and pass along or resell the resulting Registration IDs. This is why you need to "Restore iTunes Purchases" when you change devices rather than just entering a Registration ID - to do that you need to be logged in with your iTunes account, and someone illicitly distributing copies of Pleco isn't going to want to give everyone his or her iTunes account password.
The other thing "Restore iTunes Purchases" does, however, is reports back the original transaction ID that the "restore" was based on, and because it does that, Restore iTunes Purchases effectively gives us a way to differentiate the original transaction IDs from the ones that were generated as a result of re-purchases. (since the restore will always point to the original transaction and not any subsequent re-purchases) So users transferring to Android have to have restored the purchase that they're transferring at least once; otherwise they're prompted to do so again to "verify" their purchase. In this way, we can make sure that a single iTunes purchase isn't used to generate dozens of copies of Pleco for Android. (the idea to use Restore in this way hit me after a conversation with the guy who designed Apple's IAP system at WWDC last summer; back when we launched the first Android beta we had no idea if we'd be able to do transfers at all)
And we think we may be able to do the same thing with iTunes purchases; the basic idea is that we'd let you generate a single "Golden Registration ID" for a given original purchase (or set of original purchases), and that ID, unlike a normal iOS Registration ID, could be activated on a new device without having to Restore iTunes Purchases. Thus potentially allowing you to transfer it to somebody else (assuming we can make the legal end of it work), or to use it yourself if you run into account problems with iTunes. We've only been doing Android transfers for about a week, so we're waiting a bit longer to make sure everything's tight with that before we try to roll this out on iOS, but if things go smoothly we might have that up and running in another month or two. The coding part of this is pretty easy, the tricky question is how we explain it to users and how we get them to register / validate their copy of Pleco for iOS before they run into iTunes account issues.
