Why revenue shows zero in RevenueCat observer mode

A familiar setup: you do purchases yourself with StoreKit 2 and add RevenueCat in observer mode for analytics and webhooks only. purchasesAreCompletedBy: .myApp in Purchases.configure. The dashboard shows zero dollars for a week. Sandbox purchases work, App Store Connect has the transactions, RevenueCat has nothing.

Cause

In observer mode RevenueCat can listen to StoreKit 1's transaction queue; with StoreKit 2 there is no queue. If you do not call recordPurchase(_:) when a purchase completes, the SDK never sees the transaction. It is in the docs, but the word "observer" makes you assume it observes on its own.

Fix

When Product.purchase() returns a verified transaction, record it with RevenueCat before calling finish():

let result = try await product.purchase()
if case .success(let verification) = result,
   case .verified(let transaction) = verification {
    _ = try? await Purchases.shared.recordPurchase(result)
    await transaction.finish()
}

During a migration build, do not let both sides finish transactions; one closes what the other has not seen yet.

How I noticed

Not by looking at the dashboard. A Cloudflare Worker forwards RevenueCat webhooks to Telegram; after a week of silence I read the webhook, then the SDK log. The log had a "purchase completed by app, not recorded" line. Without a second source I would have taken zero revenue as real.

Lesson

Observer mode does not mean "do nothing". The record call is yours. And when revenue reads zero, suspect the measurement before the product.