In my app users will be able to tip each other with in-app purchases. How are you then supposed to pay out the users who were tipped their tips? I assume those tips would first enter the developer account but how do we then distribute that money back to the user who was tipped? Does the App Store act as a payment processor?

I want to allow users to tip other users inside of my app. Apple says in their guidelines that: Apps may use in-app purchase currencies to enable customers to “tip” the developer or digital content providers in the app. My take is that the word "may" implies that using IAP is an option and not required. If it was required, it would read "Apps must use in-app purchases..." So does this mean you can use a 3rd party payment processor such as Stripe to allow in-app users to tip digital content providers inside the app? TikTok for example uses Stripe to process and distribute tips to to their users. Can anyone clarify this for me?

Do you have to use in-app purchases if your app allows users to advertise within the app? An example of what I mean would be an app like Instagram. On Instagram you can run ads to have your posts show up for a given audience of users. You can "target" users and show them an ad. This is all done within the Instagram app. I noticed though, that Instagram has you set up your credit card when running ads, instead of in-app purchases. Does this mean that other similar apps can use a 3rd party payment processor for such a use case as well? I can't find anything related to having an ads product like this in an app in the Apple Guidelines. Does anyone have any information on this? Thanks.