Solve These 5 Google Play’s Billing Issues to Improve Your Apps
Nothing’s perfect and neither is Google Play’s billing system.
Earning money on Google Play feels satisfying. Fixing Google Play’s billing issues can feel like calming down a crying baby. You don’t know what caused it or how to fix it.
The key to solving this is knowledge. If you’re aware of these issues before they happen, it is a lot easier for you to fix them.
In this story, I will tell you about 5 billing system issues I found and my solutions for them. I learned this the hard way, but you don’t need to.
Many Google Accounts on a Single Device
Having many Google accounts on a device is the most common cause of issues. It’s not uncommon for people to have a business and a personal account on their devices. The billing system only allows you to query purchases on the active account.
It’s a good practice to recheck all purchases regularly because of refunds. This can malfunction when a user has many accounts on his phone. Losing a purchased product can feel very frustrating and it can lead to the user leaving a bad review.
When users have many devices, they often want to use your purchased products on all of them. If they don’t use the same active account, this is not possible.
Many bug reports exist for this, but the response has always been that this is the expected behavior. The billing system charges your users for purchases and tells your app the results. It’s your responsibility to figure out how to give the user what they purchased and make sure they don’t lose it.
Solution
Server-side validation of purchases is the most reliable way to solve this. By using this, you can check every missing purchase to get its actual state.
Family groups are another potential solution. They allow your users to share their purchased products across all accounts in a group. People can only join one family group, so this is not a solution for everyone.
Sometimes you can tell your users to switch their accounts before consuming purchased products. Make sure they also clear their Play Store cache. Otherwise, this solution might not work.
If nothing else works, removing all other accounts is always a foolproof solution.
Lucky Patcher
The more popular your app is, the more people try to hack it. You should get familiar with the hacking tools they might use. The most popular one is Lucky Patcher. It’s an app that hacks other apps on your phone to block ads and to get paid products for free.
The biggest issue with Lucky Patcher is that it keeps changing. This makes it difficult to create a permanent and reliable solution for it. That doesn’t mean you should give up. You might not be able to block everything, but you shouldn’t make it easy for hackers.
You might be wondering: how is this legal? Well, it’s not — in some countries. In most countries, it falls in the grey area. Distributing hacked apps is illegal. But users who only have Lucky Patcher installed often don’t get punished for it.
Solution
Server-side validation is the only reliable way I found to deal with this. This is the result of how Lucky Patcher works. It replaces common code in your app to make sure client-side validations always pass. By validating your purchases on a server, you can stop it in its roots.
You can reduce server costs by identifying installed Lucky Patcher. By figuring out the code that Lucky Patcher replaces, you can test to make sure it’s working correctly. If not, you can omit the server-side calls. In this example, you can see how I do this in my apps.
Unsupported Locations
Deploying our apps on the Play Store and selling them all over the world sounds great. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Various legal restrictions prevent us from selling in all countries. You can find the current list of permitted countries here.
This list can change with time and so can the regulations. The good thing is that Google takes care of this for you. If that’s impossible, they notify you about the actions you’re supposed to take.
Solution
The only way to get around these restrictions is to sell your products on different platforms. This would tie you into a completely different billing system and you might face other issues.
Some people use a VPN to pretend to live in a different country that has allowed purchases. You might want to recommend this to your users, but I would suggest not to. The restrictions are there for a reason and going around them might expose you to legal action.
External Payment Apps And Cancelled Orders
External payment apps can be the cause of why your users’ purchases get canceled. This can happen when a payment doesn’t get through at a specific time.
I only experienced this with UPI payment apps like BHIM. When my users didn’t confirm their payments under 5 minutes, their orders got canceled.
Solution
Make sure your users confirm their payment on time, or to use a different payment method.
Dirty cache
When everything else seems to work fine, the problem might be a dirty cache. This doesn’t happen very often and is dependent on the Billing API methods you’re using — it is advisable to use the cache.
Solution
Make sure your users clear up their Play Store cache before trying to consume your products.
