A member taps Give in the app, and the phone's browser opens with your church's giving page in it. People ask about this, and it looks like something went wrong. It did not.
Why it works that way
Apple does not allow an app to collect charitable donations unless the receiving organisation has been verified through one of two specific services. We are not one of those verified organisations, and many churches cannot easily become one. In the United States churches are generally treated as tax-exempt without having to apply, so a great many of them never appear in the records those services check against.
Apple's own sanctioned alternative is to send the giver out to their browser, which is what the Give button does. We use the same behaviour on Android so that giving works identically on both, rather than one set of members having an experience the other cannot be talked through.
The gift still lands in their record
This is the part worth telling members, because it is the thing they actually worry about.
When somebody taps Give while signed in, the app hands their session to the browser, so the giving page opens already signed in as them. Their gift is attached to their account, appears in their own giving history, and counts toward their year-end statement, exactly as it would have if they had never left the app.
If that handoff ever fails, the button still opens your public giving page. They can give as a guest, which is worse than being signed in but far better than a dead end on the one screen whose whole job is to accept a gift.
What to tell someone who asks
"It opens your browser because of an App Store rule about donations. You'll already be signed in when it does, and the gift shows up in your giving history like normal."
That is usually the end of the conversation.
What has not changed
- Recurring gifts set up this way behave normally: pause, edit and cancel still live in the member's own giving screen.
- Your church still receives the money through your own Stripe account, and we still take no percentage of it.
- Year-end statements include these gifts with everything else.
One thing to avoid
Do not link members to your giving page through a URL that reopens the app. It sounds helpful, and it defeats the entire arrangement: a donation flow that loops back into the app is how an app gets rejected a second time for the same reason. Let the browser be the browser.