Be true to your advertisement of “Offline First” and make it so that we can truly go offline.
Problem solved:
I turn off the wifi for my media device (greatly extends battery life), and I only found out after I bought the app that it needs to “call home” and verify that I bought it maybe once a month? (I’ve seen it happen twice in a week). It means that if it decides to lose validation in the middle of my drive, I need to fiddle around with it to get my music turned back on (not very safe). And it’s not like I have easy wifi in my car.
Brought benefits:
Other people can truly go offline if they need to.
Other application solutions:
The plex app didn’t have an issue with truly going offline.
Same with Neutron (which I used without wifi for YEARS).
It’s offline first and what you link clearly state when your internet connection is unstable.
It’s nowhere advertised that the app can work with no internet access at all and the FAQ explains the call home. The grace periods are large and it should not happen twice in a week unless the first one did not work and it just automatically gave you more time to prevent this.
Google does not offer any way to provide proper trials and secure license checks, so call home is mandatory on Android to prevent piracy and still offer large trials.
And yet, it doesn’t clearly state that it needs to connect to internet periodically in the marketing. None of my other media apps that I used or tried had this issue, so there was no reasonable doubt that it would (since it’s not a subscription).
I looked before I first posted on reddit the first time, and there was nothing clearly stated. Heck, looking at this FAQ now doesn’t even have what you mentioned.
Google Play offers offline receipt validation, is that not a feature you can leverage?
No one read that FAQ, but it’s now present there too.
And offline receipt validation is something hundred tools can workaround in 1 sec. Server side validation is the only way and the way Google say we should use.
And yes trial + Google refunding at will at any time largely after 2 days are the reason.
They do not care about devs and we need to deal with it.
With that said, for accounts that are considered safe and old enough I can increase the grace period to like 6 month.
Ok, that helps (since that is on what I would think is the main page).
6 months would help. Does it at least re-verify upon reconnecting after being offline? Or is it just a set date it needs to check? I go months without updating stuff (since I have a lot of tracks I can go through).
Otherwise, I would be a lot more fine with that assuming it only locks out navigation (which it did not do the last 2 times; stopping playback of my in-progress playlist).
Could you do a “owned the purchase for x amount of time, you can have a bigger grace period”? Assuming that it’s past the refund date?
It does retry from time to time until the end of the grace period.
And unfortunately there’s no refund date as Google can refund anytime they want, I have an user who refunded after 2 months, I asked Google how the hell it was possible and it’s been 8 months and I’ll still waiting for them to care to answer …
After all it’s not like they just steal …
Hmmm… that’s scummy. Though, I wonder if that is on the edge of when they would still consider a refund. It would certainly look bad as a merchant to allow refunds much further back without a very good reason.
If that is the furthest out that someone was granted a refund, could add a month (or few) and assume that is past a reasonable “refund date”? Maybe mix that with “safe/old” users?
