It has come to my attention that a device may have multiple Google accounts logged into it simultaneously. I understand that pre-Honeycomb, there is a primary ID; from Honeycomb on you can simply plug in several. I currently have two IDs logged into my test tablet.
When purchasing from Google Play you can choose which account is used to make a purchase. I want to add in-app billing to an application I'm writing, and I want to make sure each Google ID gets its purchases on any device, which means I need to know which ID was used to make the purchase in the first place. This means I need to do one of the following:
Force Google Play to use one of the Google IDs chosen from within my app by the user;
Retrieve the ID that Google Play used to make the purchase.
The documentation seems to have been written with the assumption that only one purchaser would ever be active on one device. Is it possible to do this?
This seems to be an issue with the Google PlayStore application. The same has been reported at
https://code.google.com/p/marketbilling/issues/detail?id=76
I guess the app will be tied to the google account you used to download the application.You might have to use the same google id to make the purchase. Otherwise, restore of purchases could be an issue.
Related
In my android application I want to let users to authenticate with google or facebook account.
I've implemented sign-in with google already.
I'll try to implement sign-in with facebook soon.
I've read about IAP in android:
https://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_overview
https://droidmentor.com/inapppurchase-subscription/
at least what I understand it is about google account authentication.
So I wonder is it possible to make IAP in android application if the user is authenticated with facebook account ?
I cant find examples or explanations by now.
Any good examples/explanations about IAP with google is also very appreciated because I still don't have a clear vision on IAP.
fyi: In my app user will be able to buy "virtual tickets pack" (e.g.: 10, 15, 20 tickets) and to add them to their profile. and later they will "consume" tickets one by one.
Best Regards
My understanding is that you already have a user system that you are using to provide a Google login to your customers. When you add Facebook login, you'll probably want to match both Google and Facebook logins with your own custom user ID. It's always a good idea to have a custom ID of your own so that you can map it to different types of logins.
When purchasing through Google Play Billing, the purchase gets associated with the user's phone Google account and you can also provide an optional way of associating a purchase with your own user account system. In order to do that, when building the BillingFlowParams, call setAccountId and pass your account's system custom ID.
To provide the best experience persisting purchases during installs or across devices you should also be saving the purchases on your server's database. In order to do that in a secure manner, you will also have to implement server-side receipt validation. If you want to avoid most of these headaches, I recommend you to use a service like RevenueCat.
IAP can only be done through the user's google account, as that is what one needs to use any part of the Play Store. The user's google account is also where the credit card/other payment methods are stored for each user.
In spite of the above, the way users log into your app has nothing to do with them using the IAP system. When a user will choose to use an IAP, the google account data will be provided by the android device/Play Store, not by your app (Off subject:the process is similar on iOS if you ever get to try there).
What your app needs to do, is receive the confirmation of purchase from the IAP sdk and then mark on your server that this particular user has purchased this item. Basically for any purchases (no matter the payment provider) you would usually mark in your DB the following:
what the user has purchased
how much did he pay
when did he pay
provider's id of the purchase, so you can later match the accounting reports with the payment provider's report
where he payed from (IP can be a good indicator, although in the age of VPNs not necessarily 100% acurate)(this can be useful for your marketing decisions)
mark that this user now has access to the item he purchased and if it is a time limited item, mark when it expires, so you are able to later check if he still has the right to access it.
Disclaimer:
I have not used the android IAP system directly before. I have implemented mobile app payment systems before using iOS IAP and on android Braintree payments. But the process is most likely very similar with android IAPs as well.
We've completed the implementation for Google Play Subscriptions v3 in our app and we are now testing with Alpha Builds on Play Store. Everything works perfectly, apart from the orderId, which is not returned as part of the Google Play API JSON response on the device. The token is returned as expected though. Is this happening because we are testing using Alpha Testing, or is it another issue? If so, shouldn't the orderId still be sent by the Google Play API as the token already is?
So apparently this is the expected behaviour when doing pre-release testing of Subscriptions with testing account licences, the Google Play API won't send out orderIds because no actual real life purchase is being made, so Google Wallet doesn't create any order. Which translates into no orderId being received by the app.
The official response from a Google Play Developer Support representative on the matter:
Currently, test subscriptions will not appear in your Google Wallet
Merchant Center because they are not actually assigned valid order
IDs. I'm sorry for the confusion.
To manage test subscriptions, you will instead need to use the
Developer API to refund, defer, cancel, or revoke test subscriptions.
To take any of these actions, you will simply need the app's package
name, the subscription ID, and the purchase token.
and when asked what not actually assigned valid order IDs means,
As per your concern, since it's test purchase, there won't be any
order ID. The order ID will however only exists when you move to
production.
I am working on an Android 4+ app that is free and includes some In-App Purchase items. Some testers are participating in the current beta-test and once the final version is published I would like to let these testers use the IAP items for free.
Is there some "easy" or official way to do this?
This will be my first app in the Play Store (only worked for iOS so far) and I do not know if there is any possibility to create promo codes or something like this to let users purchase non-free IAP items for free.
The only solution I found so far would be some kind of back door within the app, e.g. "Go to page XY, click twice on image A to bring up the unlock screen, enter your username and key..."
Of course this would work but I do not like this solution. Beside the additional work to implement such a solution it would not be really save. I do not know most of my testers in person and if one decides to publish his unlock key on the internet I cannot prevent all kind users from unlocking the app for free (at least not in the current version).
So, is there any way within the Play Store API to get this working?
Short answer: No!
Detailed answer and a possible way to do this:
Right in the Developer Console --> Settings --> License Testing Panel. There you can add up to 400 eMail adresses. Anyone who's using one of those eMail adresses is able to make test-purchases, this means they won't be charged but the Google Server will respond with something like "Yeah he/she bought this item".
Limitation: It's meant test purchases, mainly for applications that aren't published.
From the docs:
You can use any Google account as a test account. Test accounts are
useful if you want to let multiple people test In-app Billing on
applications without giving them access to your publisher account's
sign-in credentials. If you want to own and control the test accounts,
you can create the accounts yourself and distribute the credentials to
your developers or testers.
Though it's still possible to make test-purchases in published application. But there's one major drawback: The purchase will be cancelled automatically after 14 days.
Quote from the docs:
Test purchases are real orders and Google Play processes them in the
same way as other orders. When purchases are complete, Google Play
prevents the orders from going to financial processing, ensuring that
there are no actual charges to user accounts, and automatically
canceling the completed orders after 14 days.
To sum it up: The In-App Billing API doesn't offer an official way to do something like this. If you wanna do this you have to implement your own solution.
See also this SO-Post "Coupons for In-App Billing" which discusses this topic as well.
is that OK and safe to set a value in SharedPreference to flag that the user have purchased this item? What if user hack this value in SharedPreference. Or I need to connect IAP service everytime to check that before user can use it?
(1) What is the best practice when I use Google Android IAP V3?
(2) And also if user's device have no Google Play installed, I may want to use paypal to make the payment, but how to track the purchase and unlock the features for users if I ask user to use simple paypal payment to get a license key? I do not want to use any other billing SDK, if with Paypal web page to buy the license, How to implement this?
(1) What is the best practice when I use Google Android IAP V3?
--> official document says that only payment transaction will be handle by google play itself, but in the application you have to set your business logic how you handle UI integration and other things after product purchase. You can also go with the in app purchase v3.
(2) And also if user's device have no Google Play installed, I may want to use paypal to make the payment, but how to track the purchase and unlock the features for users if I ask user to use simple paypal payment to get a license key? I do not want to use any other billing SDK, if with Paypal web page to buy the license, How to implement this?
--> You can ask user to update google play version dynamically. Google developer doc says more than 90% device using 2.2 os with installed google play store. I could not say any thing about paypal transaction because I haven't use it before, but yes in app purchase using v3 is very simple to implement and understand the payment process.
How to use in your application
Three way to manage your application's product data.
1) SharedPrefrence:
you can use the share prefrence value and check whether it is purchased or not. if in case user uninstalled the app and then re-install the app then you can check whether user has purchased or not, at this you get the item is already purchased. And you have to manage the user to access your application data.
2) local database:
you can also use local sqlite database to store the purchase detail and purchase status. and same as above if user clear data or uninstall the app then request for the purchase item again and check whether user purchased item or not.
or
2) Server database:
It is the better way compare to above if you are using web server to store the user data. In this type, you doesn't even need to manage for the second time for the case if user uninstall the app or clear the application data.
3) obfuscation: (Most efficient way compare to shared prefrence)
EDIT:
is that OK and safe to set a value in SharedPreference to flag that the user have purchased this item? What if user hack this value in SharedPreference. Or I need to connect IAP service everytime to check that before user can use it?
While I am searching on internet I found Nikolay Elenkov's answer like below:
If you just save a flag in shared preferences, any user with a rooted
device can flip the flag at will and be 'subscribed' without paying.
So you should at least do some obfuscation. Here's a sample way to do
it. Additionally, there is an API to check for subscription state, so
you should check periodically to make sure the subscription is valid.
more information check Nikolay Elenkov's answer
What is the best for billing Either In app purchase or Paypal?
It is depends on the product type,
--> In app billing: Best for google in app billing,
For the digital products including downloadable content such as media
files or
photos, virtual content such as game levels or potions, premium
services and features, and more.
http://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/index.html
--> Paypal: Best for Paypal billing,
For physical content or product do you want to share. You are not
permitted to sell physical goods or services using 'In-App Purchasing'
since the goods purchased via this method must relate directly to the
app using them.
Purchase physical product from iPhone app without Apple in app purchase
Hope it will help you.
from the documentation:
Because the Google Play client now caches In-app Billing information
locally on the device, you can use the Version 3 API to query for this
information more frequently, for example through a getPurchases call.
Unlike with previous versions of the API, many Version 3 API calls
will be serviced through cache lookups instead of through a network
connection to Google Play, which significantly speeds up the API's
response time.
Which basically means you can look up the purchase each time and the Play Store app will respond pretty much right away.
From my experience I can assure you of one thing.
** In fact it's bad to put a flag with a bool saying if it's premium or not **.
What I do is obfuscate the shared code
After I create some strange strings or numbers that only identify through the code inside the app if the user is a premium user.
Along with this, except for a numeric code within the database that identifies the type of purchase. So by checking both I can make sure the user is premium.
At this point if they want to cheat me with the root of the phone they should first understand how the code of my app works and then understand where to interact, because if only the shared preferences change, nothing will change and they will be whipped.
** This doesn't translate to high security, but at least the security level is higher and the root won't be able to get a reward that easily. Also because they should understand what are the exact codes to insert in the shared, in the database and look for them by removing the obfuscation. I honestly don't think it's worth it for them. **
As what Kuffs has mentioned, it is best to query the app-side implementation of the In-App Billing library which in turn queries the device's Google Play client. This will ensure that the purchase history most recently obtained from the Google Play servers would be reliable and relatively fresh information.
Also, keep in mind that if you are distributing the app on Google Play you MUST use the Google Play payment mechanism via In-App Billing. As it stands, Google Play and Wallet do NOT yet support Paypal or wire/bank transfer methods so you should not integrate the option if you are releasing it on Play.
http://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html#payments
I'm developing our first app that uses in app purchases, and need to test that it's working correctly.
Currently if I try to make a purchase on the "android.test.purchased" item, I get an error message back saying "invalidClient". I'm led to believe that this is because my account is not a test user.
I found this page:
http://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_admin.html#billing-testing-setup
which tells me how to set up a test user. I could set up a new user account, but I only have the one Android device to hand, which means doing a factory reset to make this the primary account, and I'd rather avoid that if possible.
Alternatively, can I make my own personal account double up as a test user?
The link above says that test users have limitations, one of which is:
Test accounts can only be used to purchase items that are listed (and
published) in an application's product list.
That seems to imply that I could only use my account to buy things in my in-development apps, and not from other apps as normal.
So can I turn my own personal account into a test user, without any problems when using the account to purchase other apps as normal?
It won't affect your abilities to use the test account as a normal account for other apps on Google Play.
So simply you can use your own account as a test account. (Actually if your account is the publisher account, you don't need to add it as a test account.)
The limitations mentioned in the documentation is a comparison to the publisher account.
Unfortunately there's no way around it. If you just have one device you have to wipe the device and then first sign in with the email address that you want to use as a test account. Only then will you be able to test in-app billing. You can also download other items from the Google Play store. I've done this without any problems.