Important Notes When Testing Google Play Sandbox – Account Conflict Issue

I’d like to share my experience in case others run into a similar issue during Google Play sandbox testing.

This unexpected behavior took quite a bit of time to figure out.

Problem Summary

If multiple Google accounts are signed in on the test device,

the system may reuse a previous purchase receipt from one of those accounts.
It seems that Android treats the first (oldest) signed-in account as the default,

and continues referencing its purchase history even in sandbox mode.
In my case, I had a real subscription purchase on main@gmail.com (used in production),

and although I was testing with test.sandbox@gmail.com, all attempts were rejected with the message:

“You are already subscribed”.

How I Solved It

Remove all unnecessary Google accounts

→ Only keep the test account (test.sandbox@gmail.com) on the device.
Use only the test account

→ Sign in with just the sandbox test account before running your test.
Make sure the test account is registered as a license tester

→ Go to Google Play Console > Settings > License Testing,

and confirm the test account is added. Without this, sandbox purchases won’t work at all.

Hope this helps anyone facing similar issues! Let me know if you’ve seen other variations of this behavior.

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Hi, when testing it is recommended to only have one Google account on the device as Google does not have good support for multiple accounts. When an app is downloaded in the phone, it’s attached to the Google Play account that downloaded the app so any interaction with Google play billing within that app will be associated to that user account. We can make this case more clear in our testing docs.