We develop and publish our own apps as well as apps for others to publish on Google Play. Back when Google Play was Android Market, we used the following strategy for testing the licensing code in apps we developed for others:
- Upload (but do not publish) the app to our publisher account. The app included our publisher public key with the license check code.
- Test the app as we set different licensing responses through our developer console.
- When we were satisfied that everything was working properly, we deleted the uploaded app from our Android Market account. We could do this because the app had never been published.
- Change the publisher public key in the licensing code to that of our partner.
- Deliver the .apk to our partner to publish in their publisher account on Android Market. This worked because we had deleted the app from our Android Market account.
It’s been the better part of a year since we did this. Does anyone know if the same strategy can be used with Google Play? In particular, do the parts in bold above still work? Is it still possible to complete remove all traces of an app that has been uploaded but never been published, so that someone else can then upload and publish it?
One alternative, which we will do if we must, is to change the app’s package name for our license testing phase. However, this is complex and can introduce additional errors when we change the package name back.
Another alternative is for our partner to set up a user account for us. However, while user accounts can be restricted from viewing financial data, they cannot (as far as we can tell) be restricted to working with a single app. We can understand why partners would not want to allow such broad access.
UPDATED ANSWER:
Sadly, Google Play no longer supports draft apps at all. So the entire strategy is defunct. See the Android docs on testing in-app billing for the alternatives that Google has provided.
ORIGINAL ANSWER:
Well, the answer is that the strategy still works. If you’ve never published the app, you can remove all traces of it from Google Play and another publisher account can then upload an app with the same package name. All you need to do is deactivate (if necessary) and then delete all .apk files and the app will disappear from your developer console.
If the app was ever published, this will not work. You can unpublish an app, but you cannot delete any .apk files that were ever active while the app was published. (This behavior is undocumented as far as I can find.) This is unfortunate; it would be nice to be able to completely remove all traces of an app that was never downloaded by anyone. Even better would be a sandbox area that emulated all aspects of Google Play, including buying your own app (and would support doing it through the emulator).
I also discovered that the delays involved in propagating changes to all Google Play servers seems worse than it did a year ago with Android Market. In one case, when testing license responses I had to wait two hours after uploading (but not publishing) an app before the response came back as anything from “NOT_MARKET_MANAGED”.