Apple has introduced a new “billing grace period” feature that it hopes will improve the customer experience for subscriptions in the App Store. Announced on the Apple Developer website, the feature aims to help users affected by unsuccessful auto-renewals of subscriptions.

Apple explains that when a user’s subscription renewal fails, it will now attempt to collect payment from the user, but allow them to continue accessing the service during that process.

For instance, if your subscription fails because your credit card has expired, your subscription won’t be immediately interrupted. Instead, Apple will reach out to you to collect payment while keeping your service active.

For developers, Apple says a failed subscription payment that is successfully collected during the grace period means there won’t be any interruption to revenue.

Apple explains:

Billing Grace Period allows you to let subscribers whose auto-renewal failed due to a payment issue continue accessing your app’s paid content for a period of time while Apple continues to attempt to collect payment. There won’t be any interruption to the subscriber’s days of paid service or to your revenue if Apple is able to recover the subscription within the grace period of your subscription product. Without enabling Billing Grace Period, the subscriber’s days of paid service are paused until Apple is able to collect payment.

Here’s how long the billing grace period is for each subscription duration

Developers can learn more on Apple’s website. Note that each developer has to manually enable the Billing Grace Period feature through iTunes connect for their applications.

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