Q: iTunes apps and PayPal

This is the 2nd time this has happened to me in as many years.  The first time it happened, my only resolution was to go purchase iTunes gift cards and deposit money in my account there, but even then it took some hoops to even download free updates.  I didn't want them having my credit card, so I struggled through it.

The reason I had to do this was because I couldn't complete recreating the Billing Agreement on PayPal.  Everything worked fine on the PayPal side as far as that wa concerned, but when it would redirect to iTunes it would fail.

This time, I was able to successfully re-establish my PayPal billing agreement and it worked like a champ.  Try that and see if it works for you (PayPal automaticallly marked my old one inactive, unless it had already done so before, which would have caused the problem.)

• Open the iTunes app
• Hold Alt-S to bring up the Store context menu
• Select "View my Apple ID"
• When you get there, it should show a red message that a prior purchase didn't go through
• Edit your billing info
• Select PayPal again and press "Continue"
• A new window will open in your web browser app to the itunes store. (LEAVE iTunes OPEN!)
• Log in to PayPal
• Accept the new billing agreement and continue
• Click the button to redirect back to iTunes (this step is critical)
• Confirm in the iTunes app that a success message appears.

Once all that is completed, you should be good to go.

Since this happens to multiple people everytime I see it, I have to assume that one day/night around the same time each of us has a purchase to complete through our existing PayPal billing agreements, but there is a problem between the Apple and PayPal services at that time... for some reason the problem knocks out any chance of "retry" attempts and leaves us all in this state.

I hope they will work on figuring out how to rectify this so retries can happen and we won't have to deal with it in the future.

Best of luck to all experiencing this...  hope this helps.

I had this problem as well.  I was in Internet Explorer.  I copied and pasted the link into Firefox and agreed to the PayPal / iTunes agreement and then a window popped up saying it needed to open in a program and had a box with the options it could be opened in.  (iTunes was the only option)  I checked the box saying to use that program from now on then I double clicked on iTunes and it went through and opened correctly in iTunes and the payment method was PayPal.  So try opening the link through firefox!!!