Testing in-app purchase before going live

Question

So here is the scenario:

1. You have already tested your in-app purchase code in the sandbox environment and everything went perfectly.
2. Your app is now "Ready for Sale" and you want to make sure in-app purchases work flawlessly prior to actually letting your app hit the app store.

To try this, I downloaded a "pre-release" version from the App Store using a promo code, but when I try to purchase the unlocked version, it no longer finds the product like it did in the sandbox environment and my "transaction error" alert view will pop up saying the in-app purchase failed.

My question is this: Is the in-app purchase unavailable prior to the app going live on the App Store (in my scenario where I downloaded it early via a promo code)? For instance, when I set my availability date for Friday and the app is finally in the wild, will the in-app purchase show up and allow users to purchase it, assuming it worked in the sandbox?

Thanks for any insights! Greatly appreciated.

Seise

Answer 1

As it turns out, the app does indeed need to be available in the App Store before the in-app purchase will show up. So if you try and get a "pre-release" look like I did, it won't work until you actually release the app into the store via setting the availability date.

As soon as I let the app into the wild, in-app purchase actually worked a lot faster than it did in the sandbox environment. Very, very little lag.

Hope that helps someone in the future!

Seise

So, there is no way to test the 'live' (i.e., NOT sandbox) environment before releasing the app? Just do everything exactly as in the sandbox (except Apple's receipt validation URLs), and hope for the best? I'm asking this because I have setup two separate environments in my content server, mostly copy/paste-ing the 'test' environment into the 'live' environment, and I hoped to test my server code (the 'live' version) before actually going live... – Illlooking