WWDC20 finished almost two months ago, but still we are all talking about the new frameworks, APIs, and improvements announced this year. Among all those there’s something that is going to have a strong impact to the way we work when implementing in-app purchases in our apps. That is the brand new capability of testing StoreKit locally in Xcode 12.
Up until now one had to stop the development workflow and visit the App Store Connect in order to create the necessary in-app purchase records and at least one sandbox user so testing is possible. After having gone through all required steps that we had described in a previous tutorial, developer could continue writing the in-app purchases related code. Obviously a disturbing yet unavoidable change of mindset like that is always enough to slow the development process down. In addition to that, subsequent visits to the App Store Connect would also be necessary most of the times in order to create additional test users.
Thankfully, that slow situation might belong to the past starting from Xcode 12 with the StoreKitlocal testing! Not only it’s not necessary to stop the development workflow in order to visit the App Store Connect, but implementing and debugging IAPs can now be done at a blazing speed locally, simply using the Xcode and the Simulator. Developers can focus more on code implementation and make in-app purchases work perfectly, without any concern about in-app purchases records or test users until all implementation is finished. An additional benefit of StoreKit local testing is that it works offline, so in-app purchases can be implemented and tested even when there’s no Internet access available.
During the next parts of this post you’ll probably find various reasons why testing StoreKit locally is great. However, what makes it really awesome is the fact that it will eventually make in-app purchases integration a less painful task, and testing implemented logic and any related user interface a much, much faster process.
Before we move on to the next part, there’s one more noteworthy fact; there’s a brand new framework called StoreKitTest which allows to write unit and UI tests, and therefore automate in-app purchases testing. Isn’t that really amazing?