Why I'm getting 21004 as status value in reply from apple's sandbox server testing auto-renewable subscriptions?

Question

I'm testing aut-renewable subscription but apple's sandbox server always returns status=21004, which means 'The shared secret you provided does not match the shared secret on file for your account.'. I test with a java server, which does mostly this:

    String receiptData = "theReceiptDataBytesBase64encoded";
    String sharedSecret = "theSharedSecretAsPureStringProvidedByItunesconnect";


    String jsonData = "{" +
                          "\"receipt-data\" : \"" + receiptData + "\"," +
                          "\"passsword\" : \"" + sharedSecret + "\"" +
                       "}";

    URL url = new URL("https://sandbox.itunes.apple.com/verifyReceipt");
    HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpsURLConnection) url.openConnection();
    conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
    conn.setDoOutput(true);
    OutputStreamWriter wr = new OutputStreamWriter(conn.getOutputStream());
    wr.write(jsonData);
    wr.flush();

    // Get the response
    BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
    String line;
    while((line = rd.readLine()) != null)
    {
     System.out.println(line);
    }
    wr.close();
    rd.close();

As I tried to clear up by variable values in code sample above, I didn't encode the shared secret, using it as a plain string. Is this the problem?

Answer 1

Those are days that make you feel so great to be a developer ...

Looking carefully at my question above you'll see that I used the JSON key passsword with 3 friggin' s characters !!! That was the reason for a 5 hour try-and-error experience with several test products and test users and new shared secrets in the app store sandbox.

Special thanks to the iTunes team for giving the 'wrong shared secret'-message instead of the 'what the heck is the passsword key'-message.