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Android users have to restore purchase after updating the app

  • 5 October 2021
  • 4 replies
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Userlevel 1
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We’ve just issued an update to our app yesterday.

We’re getting support requests every hour from customers who were on a subscription or free trial. Their subscription is not applied to the app after the update, so they are angry and think we’ve taken their subscription away!

To fix it, we just ask them to do a restore purchases. Works every time.

Can anyone think why this is happening?

What can we do to fix it so we don’t get hammered on support?

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Best answer by ryan 5 October 2021, 22:06

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4 replies

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

It sounds like your update may have cleared out or changed the App User ID? Calling .reset() or .logout() would clear it out, or you may be calling .identify() or .logIn() with a different App User ID from before the update?

If you go to one of the Customer timelines in RevenueCat of someone who successfully restored do you see an event that an alias was created or the purchases were transferred from another customer? That would indicate that the App User ID was changed at some point.

Userlevel 1
Badge +7

Thanks @ryan, ah yes that is happening. Is there a way we can give them a new ID without clearing the purchases?

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

You can call `.createAlias()` and pass a new ID which will merge the identities together and treat them as the same customer going forward. This cannot be undone, so it’s worth triple checking the ID is being set to the expected value and never null or a hardcoded string.

Userlevel 1
Badge +7

Many thanks for this, really appreciated! 

 

We’ve given it a go and sent a build to Google. We also made extra sure the ID is the one we want :thumbsup_tone2:

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