Google Play LIcensing - Meaning of "Respond Normally"?

Question

Hello and thanks in advance for your response.

I have my licensed app uploaded to the Play Store. I can test and get expected results with all of the static test license responses (Licensed, Not Licensed, etc). So far so good.

But if my test device has no internet connection, the license check ALWAYS fails. This is not how I understand the ServerManaged policy to work. If an install is found to have been licensed sometime in the recent past, the policy is supposed to cache information in a shared prefs file and use it if there is no internet connection.

So I temporarily commented-out the obfuscation of the data in the prefs file that the license system creates. When I look at the data, I see that the retry count and other stuff is set to zero. This is not what I expect. With data like this, it is behaving for me as if I were using a Strict policy (and I am not).

I am presuming that this is an artifact of using the test response system and that "real" users will get actual data in their obfuscated shared prefs that permits them to operate in the absence of an internet connection.

So I have tried setting the server response to "Respond Normally". When I do this, I ALWAYS get a NOT LICENSED response. And I guess this makes some sense because I have not purchased the app and downloaded it.

So how can I, as the developer, experience exactly what my end-users experience? I want to be able to test how this all works without an internet connection, for example. I cannot seem to figure out how to do this? I guess I could purchase my own app but I am not sure that will even work since the test device is logged into the test account. And it makes no sense for a developer to have to purchase their own app.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

I think I found a possible solution to your problem.

What I have done: first, I created a google group for alpha/beta testers of my app (after uploading the app, of course). Then, I ivited myself in this google group and accept the invitation. After this, I inserted my gmail developer account in the list of the users for the license test and set the server response to "RESPOND_NORMALLY".

In this way, the response of the server will be always "LICENSED" for my account, and the validity time will not expire in 2 minutes. It's as I had bought the app!

The only limitation to this trick is that you have to upload your app in a beta or alpha slot of your google developer console but, after this, you can also get a "LICENSED" answer using a debug app uploaded on your device using the usual Eclipse IDE! You don't have to wait for the generation of the link to download the test app (that is very slow to generate... Up to 24 hours!).

Answer 2

I too have experienced this frustration. I too want to have the same experience as my customers. As soon as I set 'Respond Normally' I always see the 'NOT LICENSED' response -- which seems VERY SUBOPTIMAL. I BELIEVE what Google needs to added is a setting of **'RESPOND_NORMALLY_AND_LICENSED'**. That would do what's needed.

The heart of the difficulty: if I leave my app as 'LICENSED' that works fine when I have an internet connection, then after 2 minutes with no connection, my app stops working as licensed (since the cache is set on the Google Play Server to 2 minutes). Thus if I want to use my own app day-in and day-out, I need to produce an app with licensing disabled --- something my customers never see. That's a VERY bad idea.

We all learned a long time ago: "You must eat your own 'dog food' as a developer."

• I have reported this as a 'Developer Console' Bug, but it is perhaps instead of a 'Bug,' a very strong suggestion--and it would be seemingly be simple to implement.

As a work around, I have now added code in ServerManagedPolicy.processServerResponse() to simply add two months of time the licensed time and call setValidityTimestamp(). I hope this helps someone else. Now I am content ---