Do refunded managed items need to be consumed?

Question

In my app I provide a Premium upgrade through a managed purchase (it can only be bought once) - not a subscription.

When a purchase is re-funded, the user doesn't seem to be able to re-purchase the upgrade:

int billingFlowResponseCode = billingClient.launchBillingFlow(activity, flowParams); returns ITEM_ALREADY_OWNED.

This question here seems to suggest that after about 24 hours the user should be able to purchase the item. However more than 36 hours have passed and no luck.

My question is: For a managed item that was refunded or cancelled, do I need to consume it in order to be able to purchase it again?

Or do I need to wait for more time..?

Answer 1

Okay, I have found the way...

What needs to be done is:

1. The client queries the user's purchases (I use the app-billing library).
2. The client contacts the server with the purchase tokens in order to find out which purchases are still valid.
3. The server calls the GET purchase endpoint of the Google's API (https://developers.google.com/android-publisher/api-ref/purchases/products/get), checks if the purchase needs to consumed and returns this information to the client. (A purchase needs to be consumed if purchase.purchaseState == 1 && purchase.consumptionState == 0).
4. For those purchases that need to be consumed, the client calls BillingClient::consume().

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It would have been much easier if there was an option in the Play Console to mark items as "consumable" or not - so that there wouldn't be a need to manually consume items if they were "non-consumable" in the first place.