I wanted to share our experiences getting our Pro subscription of Wifibooth (originally purchased and used several months ago on an iPad Air) activated to the iPad Pro we decided to use as our upgraded Wifibooth terminal.
Before I go any further, let me preface this with two things:
- We were ultimately successful, which is of course the important thing. But the process consumed the better part of an entire workday, and required us to pull together information from several resources to work out the full picture. That's the main reason I'm writing this: I feel that, for anyone else who finds themselves in this same situation, there are certain things they should know going in that could potentially save them hours of frustration.
- We absolutely brought this on ourselves. We did just about everything wrong at every step of the process, and almost certainly made it much more difficult than it should've been. So, again, I feel that being told "whatever you do, don't follow our example" could help others avoid making quite as big a mess of things.
Going into this process, the iPad Air had Wifibooth installed & all Pro features unlocked. The app wasn't installed on the iPad Pro at all.
When Wifibooth was initially installed to the iPad Pro, I have absolutely no idea what Apple ID was signed in to iTunes. I hadn't yet been pulled into the process. There are somehow around 4 different possibilities, and nobody thought to even check. At that point, nobody had any idea what Apple ID was signed in to the iPad Air, either. Nor did they know which Apple ID the subscription had been purchased under. So they started guessing.
Never do this. If W̶o̶o̶d̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶g̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶P̶o̶l̶i̶c̶e̶ someone had just taken the time to figure out the Apple ID situation before leaping into the install process, I'm sure none of this would ever have happened. But, impulsivity being what it is, that wasn't the case. Instead, they tried to use Wifibooth's Recover Purchase, it would fail, so they'd switch to a different Apple ID. Which involved more guessing of passwords, and then when that inevitably failed, the password-recovery process would be initiated.
To make a long story... still long, by the time I stepped in the logins and access were a mess. I pulled up the email receipt for the Wifibooth purchase (a 90-second action that would've saved hours of time), determined the correct Apple ID, and signed it in to iTunes on iPad Pro. At which point... Recover Purchase still failed with the same error suggesting I might be using the wrong Apple ID. But I knew for certain I wasn't.
What I eventually discovered was that, even when signed in to the 100%-certain correct account, even being able to see the Wifibooth subscription purchase in that account's Purchase History, Wifibooth wasn't showing up in the Subscriptions list on the iPad Pro. (Which you can reach by choosing View Account for the signed-in iTunes account, then selecting Manage Subscriptions from the dialog that comes up.)
The subscription ("Active") for Wifibooth Pro was visible if I did the same things on the iPad Air — with that same Apple ID signed in — but on the iPad Pro I wasn't seeing the Wifibooth subscription, or any of the account's other subscriptions. This turned out to be the first bit of critical information.
Signing out and back in, signing out and restarting the iPad Pro, none of these worked to cause that account's Subscriptions to show up, and predictably Recover Purchases kept failing. At this point I opened a chat with Apple support. Their rep (Trevor) noticed that the iPad Pro wasn't running the very latest iOS 12.2, so he had me upgrade, and even though it felt like busy work I complied.
I don't know that it was actually the iOS 12.2 update that made the difference. My suspicion is that it may have simply been the deep reboot that occurred during the process of updating. But, regardless what did it, when the iPad Pro came back up running 12.2, suddenly that Apple ID was showing the correct Subscription list just like the iPad Air, including the "Active" subscription for Wifibooth Pro. Huzzah!
...Except, Recover Purchase still failed. And it failed again after I signed out, restarted, and signed back in again. (The Subscription list was still populated, though.)
So at that point, I decided that Wifibooth deserved a fresh start as well. So I deleted the app and all of its data (nothing user-generated) from the iPad Pro, restarted one last time, and then actually went into the Subscriptions list to pull up the app, so I could re-download and install it. (I don't think the Subscription-list path actually had anything to do with it at all, it was just an abundance of paranoia.)
Once Wifibooth launched after reinstalling, this time under the correct Apple ID right from the outset, I went into the purchase page, tapped Recover Purchase, and instantly all of the Pro features unlocked.
So, I guess the TL;DR version of this, especially in the context of the information provided in the Wifibooth In-App Purchase Packages article, would be:
- To successfully Recover Purchase from Wifibooth, your Pro Subscription must be visible and "Active" in the iTunes & App Store "Manage Subscriptions" list for the signed-in Apple ID, ideally before even installing Wifibooth on the device. Ignore all that stuff about "You may be prompted to sign-in with your Apple ID. Make sure you use the same Apple ID that you used to purchase the package!" If you wait until then to sign in, you may have trouble. Sort out the Subscription status first.
- If you didn't follow the previous advice, or only sorted it out after Wifibooth was already installed, completely uninstalling and reinstalling the Wifibooth app CAN get things working again.