A free trial is an introductory offer, and the App Store gives each customer one per subscription group.
Apple documents the free trial as one of three introductory offer types, alongside pay up front and pay as you go. Its App Store Connect Help page, read on 21 October 2026, states the limit plainly: although you can create an introductory offer for each subscription product, each person is only eligible to redeem one introductory offer per subscription group. So a customer who takes a free month on your monthly plan cannot take another free month on your annual plan if both plans sit in the same group. Google Play has no equivalent rule. On Play you choose the eligibility criterion yourself, and one of the three options hands the decision to your own code. Both stores set the shortest trial at 3 days. Apple's menu stops at 1 year, and Google goes up to 3 years.
What follows is the eligibility rule on each store, the lengths you can actually pick, who checks whether a customer qualifies, and what is left for someone who has already used their one trial. That last question has a real answer on both stores. The answer is simply not an introductory offer. Every figure here was read from Apple's and Google's own pages on 21 October 2026, and neither page prints a last-updated date of its own.
Check what your customer is eligible forThe short version
One cap you cannot move, and one you write yourself.
The two stores have built the same feature on different assumptions. Apple decided that a customer gets one bite at a discounted start, counted across a whole subscription group, and it enforces that for you. The upside is that you cannot accidentally give away two free months. The downside is that you cannot deliberately do it either, no matter how good the business reason looks on a spreadsheet.
Google built a configuration surface instead. A free trial is one phase inside an offer, an offer is attached to a base plan, and the offer carries eligibility criteria that you select. Two of those criteria are checked by Google. The third, called Developer determined, is checked by nothing except your own code, and Google's documentation points at second chance free trials as the reason it exists. More control, and more of the policing is yours.
How many free trials can one customer get?
On the App Store the number is one, and the unit it is counted in is the subscription group. Apple says it twice on the same help page. Once in the body text, and once in an FAQ headed with the difference between introductory offer limits and customer eligibility limits. The FAQ spells out the consequence that catches people: you can create an offer on every product in a group, and you can have several live at once, but new and returning customers are only eligible to use one of them. Apple's own example is a customer who takes a free trial and then upgrades to another product in the same group that also has a free trial. They do not get the second one.
That is worth reading slowly, because it means the thing you build your paywall around is a property of the group rather than the product. Two monthly tiers and an annual tier in one group share a single allowance between them. Move a product into its own group and it carries its own allowance. Apple does not describe that as a workaround, and nothing on the page forbids it, but it changes how upgrades behave, so it is a decision about your catalogue and not a trick.
Apple also tells you not to trust your own paywall on this. Offers appear on your product page automatically for eligible users, and if you display them inside the app as well, the help page tells you to use receipt validation so that you only show an offer to people who can redeem it. A purchase that the customer is not eligible for will not go through at the discounted terms, so the damage from getting it wrong is a bad screen rather than lost money. The same local check sits behind the restoring purchases requirement, which is the other place a paywall has to know what a customer already owns.
One more operational detail from the same page, because it has wasted plenty of afternoons. Changes you make to product metadata can take up to 1 hour to appear in the sandbox environment. A trial that refuses to show up in a sandbox test straight after you create it is probably not misconfigured yet.
Check one customer
Who can still get a free trial
Pick the customer in front of you. The answers use the field names each store uses inside its own console.
Never bought anything in your app
App Store: Eligible. This is the one introductory offer they get in that subscription group.
Google Play: Eligible under either New customer acquisition option, never had this subscription or never had any subscription.
Read from both stores on 21 October 2026. Apple enforces its cap itself. On Play, two of the three criteria are checked by Google and the third is checked by your code.
How long is a free trial allowed to be?
On the App Store you pick from a list, and the list is short. App Store Connect Help gives the free trial options as 3 days, 1 or 2 weeks, 1, 2, 3 or 6 months, and 1 year, read on 21 October 2026. A 14 day trial is available. A 10 day trial is not. The surprise in Apple's own table is that the free trial column does not change with the subscription duration. Every row, from a 1 week subscription to a 1 year subscription, offers the same free trial list. On paper a weekly subscription can carry a one year free trial.
The column that does narrow is pay as you go, which is the discounted price option rather than the free one. A 1 week subscription can run pay as you go for 1 to 12 weeks. A 3 month subscription can only run it for 3, 6, 9 or 12 months. A 1 year subscription gets exactly 1 year. Pay up front stays constant at 1, 2, 3 or 6 months and 1 year. If the free trial is the wrong instrument for what you want, those two are the alternatives inside the same single allowance, and the price you attach comes from the same price points as the subscription, which is where app store pricing tiers becomes the next thing to read.
Google Play has a range instead of a menu. A free trial pricing phase provides a specified number of days, weeks or months at no charge, and Google documents the range as 3 days to 3 years. It says so on the Understanding subscriptions page and again in the step-by-step for adding a phase to an offer, both read on 21 October 2026. So the floor is identical on both stores, 3 days, and the ceiling differs by a factor of three. One Play detail is easy to miss: for an installments base plan, which Google currently offers only in Brazil, France, Italy and Spain, the free trial phase does not count as part of the initial commitment, while an introductory pricing phase does.
Google, Play Console Help, understanding subscriptions, read 21 October 2026
Who decides whether a customer qualifies on Google Play?
You do, when you create the offer, by selecting one of three eligibility use cases. New customer acquisition covers a user who has never had entitlement to this subscription, or who has never had entitlement to any subscription in this app. Those are two separate options in the console, and the gap between them is the whole question of whether a customer who trialled one product can trial another. Upgrade covers a user who currently holds a specified subscription, optionally narrowed to a billing period, which is how you give an annual plan a discounted start to people on a monthly one. Developer determined covers everything else.
Developer determined is the honest one. Google writes that, unlike the Upgrade and New customer acquisition criteria, Google Play does not evaluate any eligibility criteria at all, and gives second chance free trials and win-back offers for lapsed subscribers as examples of what you would use it for. Two consequences follow. The logic lives in your app, so a bug in it is a free trial you did not mean to hand out. And because the logic lives in your app, such an offer cannot be purchased outside it, which rules it out of anything Google surfaces on the store itself.
Google does run one check of its own on top. Play may detect users attempting to circumvent free trial or introductory pricing eligibility criteria, and the stated outcome is mild: a user who does not meet the criteria can still purchase the base plan, without the free trial or the introductory price. Nobody is blocked from subscribing. They just pay the normal price.
Two numbers are worth writing down before you plan a season of offers. For each subscription you can create up to 250 base plans and offers combined, with a maximum of 50 active at the same time, and the rest have to sit in draft or inactive. And you cannot delete any of it. Google keeps subscriptions, base plans and offers for reporting, so IDs cannot be reused and an obsolete offer gets switched to inactive rather than removed. Both figures read on 21 October 2026.
Google, Play Console Help, offer eligibility and offer phases, read 21 October 2026
What can you offer a customer who already used their trial?
Quite a lot, and this is where the one per group cap stops being a dead end. Apple has two other offer types for exactly this customer. A promotional offer gives a discounted price for a set duration to existing and previously subscribed customers, and Apple's help page says in as many words that customers can accept it even if they have already accepted an introductory offer. You get up to 10 active promotional offers per subscription, they apply to every storefront where the subscription is available rather than a chosen country list, and only the price can be edited afterwards.
A win-back offer is the other one, and it is aimed at lapsed subscribers. Apple configures these per subscription product rather than per group, and notes that a customer is only eligible for the win-back offer attached to their most recently lapsed product within each group, so reaching lapsed subscribers across several products means a separate offer for each. The eligibility fields are specific: a minimum paid duration between 1 and 24 months or 3, 4 and 5 years, a window for how many months have passed since they last subscribed with both a minimum and a maximum required, and an optional wait between offers of 2 to 24 months. An offer has to run for at least 3 days, and the earliest start date is one day after today.
On Google Play the same job is the Developer determined offer, with the eligibility test written by you. There is no separate win-back product type to configure. Whichever store you are on, the thing to get right before any of this is what happens at the moment the trial converts and the first real charge is attempted, because a declined card is a different problem with its own rules. That is what subscription grace period covers.
One rule people trip over sits in the naming rather than the eligibility. Google's Play Console Help page on creating subscriptions tells you your subscription name must accurately reflect your offer, and instructs you not to name your subscription Free Trial. It goes further on the benefit lines you can attach to a subscription: since not all users will be eligible for a promotional price or a free trial, a benefit must not mention a free trial or a price, and Google gives Try 7 days free as its example of a benefit that is not allowed. Apple's App Store Review Guidelines take the opposite line in one narrow case. Guideline 3.1.1 lets a non-subscription app offer a free time-based trial through a price tier zero non-consumable named with the convention XX-day Trial, provided the app identifies the duration, what stops working and any downstream charges before the trial starts.
The same free trial, described differently by each store
Every row below comes from the two help pages linked above, read on 21 October 2026. Only one row is the same on both stores.
| The detail | App Store, introductory offer | Google Play, offer phase | Same on both |
|---|---|---|---|
| What the trial is called | An introductory offer, with the type set to Free | An offer phase, with the type set to Free trial | No |
| How many one customer can get | One introductory offer per subscription group | As many as your eligibility criteria allow | No |
| Shortest trial | 3 days | 3 days | Yes |
| Longest trial | 1 year | 3 years | No |
| Length picked from a fixed list | Yes | No | No |
| Who checks eligibility | Apple, by subscription group | Google for two criteria, your own app for the third | No |
| Editable once it exists | No. Delete it and create a new one | Price only. The offer ID cannot be changed or reused | No |
Where this lands if a builder generated your app
Nothing in these rules bends because an AI wrote the code. The offer is a record in App Store Connect or Play Console, created by whoever holds the account, and the eligibility cap belongs to the store. A generated paywall screen can read a customer's entitlement and show the right thing, and that is the part code can help with. The allowance itself is not something code can change.
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So ask the agent for the paywall and the entitlement check, and keep the offer configuration as your own job in the two consoles. One practical note on sequencing: a win-back offer needs the subscription approved by App Review before you can create it, so the offer work comes after the first submission rather than before. The account costs that come with holding both store accounts are collected in cost to publish an app.
Questions people ask about subscription free trial rules
One per subscription group. Apple's App Store Connect Help page on setting up introductory offers, read on 21 October 2026, says that although you can create an introductory offer for each subscription product, each person is only eligible to redeem one introductory offer per subscription group. The same page repeats it in its own FAQ and gives the example: if a customer uses a free trial and then upgrades to a subscription product in the same group that also has a free trial, they are not eligible for the second offer. The cap applies to new and returning customers alike. A free trial is one of the three introductory offer types, so it is the same single allowance as a pay up front or pay as you go discount.
Decide the group layout before you decide the trial
On the App Store the subscription group is the unit the allowance is counted in, so the shape of your catalogue settles how many trials any one customer can ever see. Settle that first, then pick a length off the menu.
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