Google Credential: This developer account does not own the application

Question

I'm using Google client libraries and trying to make a GET request to Google Play API.

        GoogleCredential credential= new GoogleCredential.Builder().setTransport(netHttpTransport)
                .setJsonFactory(jacksonFactory)
                .setServiceAccountId(CLIENT_ID)
                .setServiceAccountScopes(SCOPE)
                .setServiceAccountPrivateKeyFromP12File(file)
                .build();
                credential.refreshToken();     
        HttpRequestFactory requestFactory =netHttpTransport.createRequestFactory(credential);
        GenericUrl url = new GenericUrl(URI);
        HttpRequest request = requestFactory.buildGetRequest(url);
        HttpResponse response = request.execute();

I get

 {
  "code" : 401,
  "errors" : [ {
    "domain" : "androidpublisher",
    "message" : "This developer account does not own the application.",
    "reason" : "developerDoesNotOwnApplication"
  } ],
  "message" : "This developer account does not own the application."
}

My app is unpublished, would that cause the problem?

Answer 1

I've got the same problem. It occurs because you authorize user in Google API who does not own the application and try to get data that belong to your app.

In this topic it is well described. http://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2528691&topic=16285&ctx=topic

You should authorize by OAuth2 the owner of application, and then use Google API with obtained token.

Answer 2

The problem is you are using the Service accounts OAuth 2.0 flow to authorize to the android-publisher API. I was doing it the same way. However, Google requires to use the Web server applications flow, which is ridiculous, since a human interaction is needed to allow for the API access.

Fortunately there is a way around it. You just have to obtain the refresh_token, store that and keep using it for future API calls. I wrote about it in more detail on my blog.

Answer 3

We also struggled with this problem as we wanted to validate a purchase on our servers in order to unlock certain features. We tried multiple solutions and frameworks, written by fellow community users and even official implementations but none worked.

Turns out all we had to do was renew our OAuth token (which we just created) and then it all started working.