Flutter Android app shows "Ask your parent" when buying a subscription

Hey @Tobin Harris!

All pop ups that you see in the app come directly from the app stores themselves and not RevenueCat. You can send the parents this link from Google’s help center to approve the request: https://support.google.com/families/answer/7039872?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&oco=1#zippy= 

1. When a family member makes a purchase, they'll see a screen that asks for your password.
2. Review the request.
3. To approve it, enter your Google Account password on their device.
4. Click Approve.

This is what the link you sent advises for paid products. Problem is, our customers are not being shown the password popup. Instead, just a popup that says “Ask your parent”.

We have a similar problem where a parent is unable to start a free trial on their daughter’s phone that is managed by Family Link. The parent disabled the requirement for needing approval for their daughter but is still getting blocked by the modal below. Curious if there’s any new information or suggestions for Family link subscriptions?

Kids will be an increasingly larger audience for our product so this is particularly important for us.

@Tobin Harris Thanks! :)

We looked into this some more and found a similar finding from google support docs that Family Payments generally isn’t allowed to be used for subscription purchases: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/6294544?hl=en#zippy=%2Cpurchases-you-can-use-the-family-payment-method-for%2Cpurchases-you-cant-use-the-family-payment-method-for

We don’t fully understand how Family Link works yet but it sounds like it’s really official that Families can purchase consumables but not subscriptions 🤦‍♀️. Not sure what is a good workaround for this though. 

@Rouuuge Unfortunately no. The docs I linked in my last post suggest that Google Play deliberately doesn’t support this period and we aren’t aware of any loopholes. If apps are allowed to provide alternative purchase flows from Apple v Epic, then something like Stripe would probably be the workaround for this.

Hi @Rouuuge 

Sorry for the delay.

We never found a workaround on Google Play.

The parents aren’t happy about it because it worked before we introduced subscriptions. We had to apologise and told them we were working on a workaround. Not great at all. 

We eventually found a workaround, which is basically to grant entitlements to individual users using RevenueCat. You can do this directly from RevenueCat by finding a customer and then selecting the entitlement and granting to a customer. You have to know know the user ID (which we get from a support email generated by the app).

What about you? Did you find a way forward?

There’s a simpler work-around. Add a one time yearly subscription as in “2022 subscription” while this is inferior to subscription - it will allow us users to use the app.