iOS recurring subscription policy for service, not content

I think the policy around auto-renewing subscriptions on iOS may have changed recently, but it's tough because there's still a lot of older information and testimonials from developers out there. Marco Arment's blog talks a lot about the policy here and here, but those are from 2012 and 2013

As of now (mid-2014), from what I've been able to gather, the relevant policy has changed from this:

"Apps that use IAP to purchase items must assign the correct Purchasability type Appler In-App Purchase is currently an Auto-Renewable Subscription. However, it would be more appropriate to use the Non-Renewing Subscription In-App Purchase type. Auto-Renewable Subscriptions are intended for periodical apps, such as magazines and newspapers."

to this:

Apps may only use auto-renewing subscriptions for periodicals (newspapers, magazines), business Apps (enterprise, productivity, professional creative, cloud storage), and media Apps (video, audio, voice), or the App will be rejected.

So it seems like an older restriction that was mostly focused on periodicals has now been expanded to a bunch of other use cases. There are a number of public examples of apps like Evernote that have switched to auto-renewals.

Source: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

I am sorry that i am coming into this a little late, but i have an answer for this.

Basically about a month ago i submitted my app and it got rejected for not including iAP as it links to our SAAS website for users to set up their subscriptions. So off i went and implemented Auto-Renwing subscriptions. didn't take me too long and from testing worked fine. So i resubmitted. and got rejected again.

We found that the Purchasability Type for one or more of your In-App Purchase products was inappropriately set, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.

Cloud-books is set to Auto-Renew Subscription.

Based on product functionality, it would be more appropriate to use the non-renewing subscription In-App Purchase type. The Auto-Renewable Subscription product is best suited for apps that require or feature dynamically or frequently changing content, such as digital periodicals or radio subscriptions.

Even though when creating an iAP product there is a nice little line that says this:

Non-renewing subscriptions can still be offered, but auto-renewable subscriptions are now preferred for the following reasons:

So from my experience auto renewing is NOT allowed for SAAS.