In-app purchases made via promo codes return empty developer payload string

60
votes

I have an app published to the alpha channel, with an in-app (un)managed item that costs $1.

When I purchase normally, i.e, use a credit/debit card Google returns the correct developer payload string, but if I choose to "redeem" a promo code and enter said code, Google returns an empty developer payload string, and thus authentication fails in 'onIabPurchaseFinished()'.

I should mention that this only occurs if I choose to redeem a code from the app's purchase flow, and everything works flawlessly if I open Play Store first, redeem the code, and then come back and open the app.

Is this a bug on Google's part?

EDIT: The Play Store thing is expected, since it can't know your payload and the purchase is done without having to check for it.

1
androidgoogle-playin-app-billingpromotion-code
If I use the code from play store and then I open my app, I've got an empty string. It's obvious why, however it's really a big hole. – greywolf82
Update: further investigations in progress by Google team. – Jérémy Reynaud
@JérémyReynaud If the code is used inside the play store app, your app is not involved at all in the process, so it's normal that you won't receive any developer payload, play store can't know your string. – greywolf82
@greywolf82 you're completely right. As you note in your first comment it is a big hole as the only solution for now will be to avoid checking developer payload in the getPurchases() result as we don't know if the purchase has been made "normally" or with a promotion? Google may provide a way to declare our developer payload in the developer console to cover this case, don't you think? – Jérémy Reynaud
For information, an issue has been opened on the android-play-billing project on GitHub: github.com/googlesamples/android-play-billing/issues/7 – Jérémy Reynaud

1 Answers

5
votes

This issue was opened on the google's android-play-billing samples repo. Looks like it was ignored for a long time and was eventually closed with this comment. In short, they have following suggestions.

We reviewed our guidelines and internal APIs, and since the developerPayload is not supported across all features on In-App Billing API (including promocodes), we are removing the recommendation to use it as a security check.

As you can see in our documentation, on the page Implementing In-app Billing (https://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_integrate.html) we've added a recommendation:

Caution: Don't use the developerPayload field for security validation purposes. This field isn't always available when completing tasks related to In-app Billing. For more information about security best practices, see the In-app Billing Security and Design guide.

Our recommendation is to validate on your own backend, using the Play Developer API.