PlainText ‘Remove Ads’ double charges

We are getting reports that some people are getting charged twice for PlainText’s ‘Buy Ads’ in-app purchase. This is definitely not our intention, and we are trying to get to the bottom of it. Here’s what we know so far, what we suspect might be the problem, and what we are doing about it.

We know that the ‘Remove Ads’ in app purchase is Non-Consumable… that means it should be impossible for the same iTunes account to be charged twice for it. We also know that multiple users are reporting this problem, and they all seem to buy out of non-US app stores. Since the vast majority of our users use the US app store we “think” this problem is somehow limited to non US app stores.

Here’s what we think: Many of the people reporting this problem might not actually be getting double charged. Instead the problem might be some bad UI on our part that causes them to think are getting charged twice. I’ll explain:

Below the ‘Remove Ads’ button we placed the label “Will restore previous purchases of ‘Remove Ads’ without charge”. Our intention is to let people (in general) know that they wouldn’t be double charged. But it can also be read as a specific message to the user saying that they won’t be changed again even if they haven’t bought the purchase in the first place.

And for international customers it’s quite easy for them to think they did make the purchase in the past. Because in the past we only used the iAd network, and so no ads were ever displayed for most people using non US app stores. With PlainText 1.4 we’ve added in the AdMob network which shows ads everywhere. So its quite possible people are thinking that their purchase got lost when they updated PlainText (that shouldn’t happen) and then think that they get charged twice when really they are buying for the first time.

The next PlainText release will clear up the interface and add an explicit “Restore Previous Purchases” button. We think that should fully solve the problem and we should have added that in the first place.

The above is our current theory. The other possibility is there is some bug in iTune’s validation of In-App purchases. A possibility for sure, but we think lots more apps would be running into this problem if that were the case. If you do think this is the case (you really did get charged twice) please go through your iTunes order history and send us the information about all PlainText ‘Remove Ads’ purchases so we can send the info to Apple. Make sure to include the “total charge” for each of these purchases… you might see multiples listed, but we think only the first one will have a change, the rest will be listed as free.

Thanks, Jesse Grosjean