I'm now developing a small game with Google's in-app billing service.
And I reference to Trivial Drive of Google's sample project.
Let's me ask you about connection interruption during Purchase Items from Google Play.
It's OK when launching purchase flow with normal internet connection.
I tested like this.
As soon as purchase flow is launched, disconnect the internet connection (by unplugging the routers' LAN).
After about 2-3 minutes, It shows Connection time out.
In merchant account, Money transfer is done.
But when I query All owned items, there is no owned item of this ID (purchased recently).
And when I try to purchase again this item, It shows "Error You already owned this item".
How can I solve this problem?
Anybody encountered like this problem?
Please Help. Appreciate to all comments and helps. Thanks.
The Google IAP flows requires you to call a consumePurchase() API after doing a purchase.
What you need to do is to call the getPurchases() API, this will return a list of purchases along with a purchaseToken. Then you need to iterate through them and call the consumePurchase() API for the purchased, unconsumed products.
For more reference, look at the API reference.
Related
I'm trying to implement in-app billing system in my app to serve ads free version to users. I learned these steps and finally I succeeded to buy my product by using my test account. (I got the OK resposeCode through onPurchasesUpdated() method.)
However I could not buy it again. There was no response after calling launchBillingFlow(). I don't know why. Even if my product is ads free version (I mean permanent item.), I want to know that buying one item several times. Please let me know.
Once a managed product is purchased, it is considered to be "owned".
Managed products in the "owned" state cannot be purchased from Google
Play. You must send a consumption request for the "owned" managed
product before Google Play makes it available for purchase again.
Consuming the managed product reverts it to the "unowned" state, and
discards the previous purchase data
As soon as the User buys a product from your application, just consume it and keep track of the purchase some other way. By storing the credits on your server may be.
More on the developer site
Just be sure to call mBillingClient.endConnection() before calling mBillingClient.startConnection() again.
If you don't call endConnection() onPurchaseUpdated() will be called for every connection that is not closed.
In my case I call mBillingClient.endConnection() inside onDestroy() method of my activity.
I'm not specifically looking to have the option to refund a user for an in app purchase of a consumable, but just in the odd case that a user asks for a refund, either through google, or through the developer of an in app purchase of a consumable.
There does not seem any way of handling refunds through the In App Billing api V3. All documentation points to V2 of the api using broadcast receivers. This does not help me in least bit.
So how are refunds handled in the In App Billing v3 api? I'm assuming for a non consumable, the refund is processed, and then google handles the processing through their backend, and then when a getPurchaseState() is conducted, it would return a value of 2 (refunded). If so, this works great for a NON CONSUMABLE product.
When a getPurchaseState() call to a consumable purchase is made, it returns null. That's assuming if the purchase was previously successful, and that the item was consumed and provisioned. I figure I could store the purchase items locally within the app, but then there is still no way of receiving a refund notification for that product. I can check for purchase state, but again, it will return null, as long as it was consumed and provisioned already.
A slight workaround I can think of right now, is to not consume the purchase on provisioning. So that it remains "unconsumed" according to google, and remains in their database. Now, if a refund is requested, I am assuming a call to getPurchaseState() for that consumable will return refunded, thus the application logic can then subtract/deduct the provisioned consumable from user's inventory. If a user would want to repurchase that consumable again, then before the IAB api call is made for the purchase, get the purchaseState() and/or hasPurchase(), and if there is already a purchase there, consume that item without provisioning, this will let the user repurchase that consumable. Only issue with this workaround, is that if A user wants to re purchase the same consumable product, as soon as the select the option to repurchase, the item must be consumed regardless of whether they successfully repurchase the product or not. So if the user does not complete the purchase, the product is already consumed, and I end up back where I am now with inability to check for refund state on the consumable.
I can't think of any other way to do a refund for a consumable in app product, and that is what I ask here. Is the way I thought of sufficient, or is there a proper way to handle refunds using IAP v3 on consumables?
I was thinking I have 3 options:
Don't offer refunds for consumables, no/little exceptions, but the issue with this is if a user requests refund through google, and not through developer, leading to option 3 below)
Find a workaround (either properly through the api, or with my proposed workaround)
Offer refunds, but have no application logic to subtract/deduct the consumable. In this scenario, users could end up taking advantage of free purchases.
I know this is a super late response to this issue, but it took me quite some time to track down info on this issue, so hopefully it can help someone else out. There are a few ways of doing this... In the Google Play Developer console you can click on the left nav saying "Order Management" which will bring up a list of all recent orders though your app. If you need to refund one you can click on it, or multi select them and refund them in this view. Just a heads up... you will most likely need permissions from your account admin to see this view and refund users.
Your other option is though the API docs here. You will need to set up your API account though the Android console, which I will say is a massive pain and not clear. But once that's set up and your "Server Applications" is set up you will need to make sure it has proper permissions as well. Then you should be able to use a library such as this to do the heavy lifting for you, because from what I've read the JWT auth process though the google API is not super straightforward, and their docs are a mess. I hope this helps someone and comment if you have questions... I will do my best to answer.
This same API also can be used to find items that were purchased by users and then refunded, so you can remove these items from those users' apps. Also you can do server side purchase validation through this as well, which is highly recommended, because rooted phones can inject fake purchase requests making your app believe that it's hearing back from the google play store, but in reality it's not. You then send back to your server the purchase token and SKU of the item being purchased and then on your server you just run this. This will give you back a 400 error if it's invalid, and a 200 with a some JSON data if it's a successful purchase.
When my app queries whether it has an in-app product using IabHelper, if there is no connectivity the response I get is:
Error refreshing inventory (querying prices of items). (response: 6:Error)
And that's fine. But when my app tries to purchase an already owned item (still with no connectivity), Google Play returns that the user already has the item in question.
So, since Google Play knows whether a user has an in-app product or not regardless of there being a connection present, how do I get this information without trying to purchase the in-app product? I would like my app to know if it has an in-app product even if there is no connectivity and querying inventory fails, and the only way I know to get this information now is to try to purchase the product.
First. Drop using iabhelper, it is for your own good.
Second. Google Play Services caches information, so sometimes you get responses when device is offline. How and when this happens depends on current services implementation (which can and will change!). Make no assumptions and work with data as returned, offline or not.
I've gotten IAB v3 working and I was able to make a purchase for a managed item. However, to continue developing and testing I wanted to refund the purchase so I could try making the same purchase again. I logged into my Google Checkout Merchant account and successfully refunded the purchase. However, the app still thinks that the user has the item purchased. It has already been several weeks since I made the refund so its not a delay issue.
Basically, in my QueryInventoryFinishedListener implementation, inventory.hasPurchase(SKU_REMOVE_ADS) always returns true, even after the refund (SKU_REMOVE_ADS is the SKU for item I'm selling). I was expecting it to return false after the refund had been processed.
If you look at the 'Handling Refunds' section of the IAB reference, it says that your app needs to be listening to the IN_APP_NOTIFY messages. However the documentation for IN_APP_NOTIFY is specific to v2 of in-app billing. It doesn't seem to be something that's available in v3 since its not mentioned anywhere in the v3 reference nor can I find any reference for it in the sample TrivialDrive app that they are using to demonstrate IAB v3.
So does v3 of IAB support refunds/cancelling purchases? Has any one tried it and got it working?
There really is no difference between a consumable item and a non-consumable item so far as Google Play is concerned; this distinction is entirely based on what you implement within your app. So even though the SKU you are testing is intended to be non-consumable (e.g., a permanent premium upgrade), for testing purposes, you can treat it as a consumable and consume it, so that it can be purchased again.
A convenient approach is to set up a temporary testing menu within your app (e.g., by adding a menu item during testing onto your app's main options menu), and then to have that item's handler invoke the consumeAsync() method of your IabHelper instance for the SKU that you want to test buying again. This will consume the item and thus make it immediately available for repurchase from your device.
You will, of course, still want to refund the purchase from Google Checkout, so that you won't be spending your own money just to test your app.
I would add that consumeAsync() also seems to work just fine for resetting the test SKU android.test.purchased, if you are testing using such static values.
Regarding the updating of purchase state to reflect a refund, I have personally experienced (and there are many similar reports posted by other developers) that manually initiating a refund via Checkout (e.g., for a test purchase from the TrivialDrive app) takes days to result in a change to the purchase state of the product (to INAPP_PURCHASE_STATE_REFUNDED).
(Knowing that misery loves company, some of those additional reports can be found on this discussion thread:
https://plus.google.com/+AndroidDevelopers/posts/R8DKwZDsz5m)
At least part of this is due to Google Play's caching of purchase data on the device.
In my experience, re-booting a device can sometimes cause Google Play to refresh its cache from the GP servers. So it may be that changes due to cancellation or refunding of an order via Checkout could also be detected after a reboot.
It might seem that such a long turnaround period would do you no good, since you can't know when users will reboot. But then again, you know that every device will, eventually, get rebooted, and so if your concern is that a user who receives a refund should eventually be blocked from using the refunded IAB product, a few days of delay may not matter much, so long as it eventually happens.
Of course, remember that this notion that cache will refresh on a reboot is undocumented and anecdotal (like quite a number of IAB3 and TrivialDrive behaviors, thus far). Folklore, they call it.
Another thing that triggers an update is when the user attempts to purchase the product. As soon as the purchase is launched, the system has to be sure that the product is not already owned, and so it updates the Google Play cache. In my personal experience, this has always occurred. But again, this is not a very practical way to check for a refund, because that would involve showing the purchase dialog unbidden, and also an error message that tells the user "you already own this, " (if they do own it).
Where this does come in handy is when the user pays for an IAB item on one of her devices, and then attempts to access that item on a different device that is owned by the same account as was used to buy it. The purchase information in that case has very often not yet been cached. But you can just put a little note in your purchase dialog that if the item has already been purchased, attempting a re-purchase should make it available on the present device at no additional charge. Sometimes it takes two (user-initiated) purchase attempts to finally get the IabHelper.BILLING_RESPONSE_RESULT_ITEM_ALREADY_OWNED response. Yes, a bit klugy, but I think in human terms it will work with appropriate highlighting of the message and apologetic wording of the confirmation dialog telling them that they own the item, etc. :-) ).
As a practical matter, you can see how Google might not want every instance of every IAB app in the world to access its servers every time the app's purchase data is being accessed, especially given that they are advising developers to do a check for what has been purchased each time the app is started. It's also a performance issue for your app - that's what caching is all about. So you need to be aware of the triggers for updating the cache, and I haven't found a single place where this is officially documented (except, we presume, in the code). So get ready to put your hands out in front of you and start feeling around in the dark.
For some additional information regarding Google Play buffering, see this page:
Under What Conditions are In-App Billing Version 3 Server Changes Made Available on Client Devices?
I would note that in your post's code snippet you are calling inventory.hasPurchase(SKU_REMOVE_ADS), but that will only tell you if the purchase is in the list of purchases returned in the inventory object; it will not tell you the state of the purchase for that SKU. I know that this is the approach used by the TrivialDrive app, but that app is not dealing with refunds and cancellations. To detect refunds and canceled orders, you'll need something like this:
Purchase removeAdsPurchase = inventory.getPurchase(SKU_REMOVE_ADS);
if(removeAdsPurchase != null) {
int purchaseStateForRemoveAds = removeAdsPurchase.getPurchaseState();
if(purchaseStateForRemoveAds == 1) {
//Do cancelled purchase stuff here
}
else if(purchaseStateForRemoveAds == 2) {
//Do refunded purchase stuff here
}
}
The good news about refunds and canceled orders is that both are, AFAIK, entirely at the option of the developer. So, if you find that users who get these are able to continue using your app for a long interval thereafter, and if you find that lots of users are taking advantage of this, then you can decide if you want to continue providing the refunds in all cases. My best guess is that it will not be a problem; even if some user who gets a refund gets to use your app for a while after that, that doesn't seen like a very big deal.
It is for testing that you need the ability to re-try a purchase very rapidly, and using consumeAsync() definitely works for that purpose.
I will suggest you to use static product ids while your app is in development phase.
Now make sure you are testing the app with same Gmail Id for which you have refund? To test the refund scenario I think you can use android.test.refundedas product id.
If this is not working then you can first check total purchased item(s) and Available item(s) in google play at first launch of your app and if you are getting same product id in both the calls(which should not be the case if this is the case please report this bug to google) then make api call to make same item as consumed.
Since posting this question, its been brought to my attention that I need to call getPurchase(...).getPurchaseState() and check for its value. Possible values are 0 (purchased), 1 (canceled), or 2 (refunded).
However, in my case its still retuning 0 (purhcased) even though the item is refunded. I'm posting this information here in case it helps someone else.
I am testing Android inapp subscription with a test account, after I entered a real credit card to buy, the subscription is ok, but I cannot find the token in the json response.
So in the developer console, I cancelled the order, when I try to re-subscribe again, it now show me the alert "You already own this subscription".
When I click the "Detail" in the box, it opened the Play Store app, but showing "Item not found"
Anyone experienced this error before?
Thanks.
i guess you might have solved the problem but take a look at this question Subscription sample missing JSON parsing of purchaseToken it this might be the case for JSON.
The reason you cannot re-subscribe i think is because you are already subscribed for that period. Your subscription will end when the billing cycle ends.
Howard, the reason is that a subscription is active even after you cancel until the subscription period. It will continue to say that until the original subscription expires. I know, the Android implementation of subscriptions is really really kluegy. I've implemented in-app subs successfully on Android and have a lot of similar issues and one of them was you cannot re-purchase after cancelling if the item hasn't expired from it's original purchase date.