paulsolt / apptrial

A simple library to make it easy to offer trial periods in macOS apps

AppTrial

A library to make it easy to offer trial periods in macOS apps based on first install date.

Dev Notes

Using TDD (Red Green Refactor) and principles from Clean Code (Uncle Bob) to write the logic.

The goal isn't bullet-proof trial security, instead it's to make it fast to create a Mac app that will have a trial period (or beta period). So that you can focus on developing a worthwhile app that doesn't live forever.

The timeout will allow you to ask users to upgrade to the full version (or download a new beta), by linking directly to the paid app on the Mac App Store, or using a service like Paddle to sell a license key.

I built this for my Super Easy Timer app, which was previously using a build date, but it's annoying to rebuild every X months, so I want this to track time using a timeframe (i.e.: 7 days).

Future Features

There are more "secure" ways (keychain) to prevent users from tampering with the "install date", but I'm not worried about that for my first release.

Paddle has a way to automatically expire a trial if you change the time, which would be a nice feature, but again that's more complexity, when the simple solution should be enough for the vast amount of developers.