preorderDate no longer being returned

My app is in the final stages of testing for release in two days. We did a preorder campaign, and implemented a preorder bonus by checking the preorderDate field returned from the verification result returned by the AppTransaction.shared. This worked well at the time of implementation and initial testing.

Now, our QA team is reporting that the preorder bonus is not popping up for them, and we have confirmed it on the developer side that the StoreKit back end is no longer returning a valid preorderDate even though the app is clearly preordered when you check it on the app store. The developer accounts are in the US and App Store Connect clearly shows the US status as preorder.

Are there any circumstances where preorderDate might be nil even if the user's app store shows preorder? Any other way we can proceed here? We can message our users that we are going to have to delay a preorder bonus on iOS, but eventually we need to get to a solution that doesn't involve us entering in all our iOS preorders by hand to give them a bonus item.

We ended up just going live with this, and the live game successfully returned preorderDate. So, we were able to give rewards to players. However, this is extremely unpleasant from a developer perspective that the feature does not work until you are live on the store. Please consider making this more testable, especially since this is a feature that requires perfect execution on the most pivotal day of a new game (launch day).

preorderDate no longer being returned
 
 
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