Posting here is best for now.
I believe it will be somewhat better, and, more importantly, it will be a little bit easier to track down issues with your purchases.
There’s a lot to say about this, so I’m just going to put it in a collapsible details section here.
Click here for the gory details of tracking previous purchases
Overwhelmingly the most common reason why purchases get “lost” is that people are trying to combine purchases from multiple accounts/apps, whether that’s multiple Google Play Store accounts, or multiple choiceofgames.com accounts.
The Google Play Store is only willing to tell us about the purchases you made using the current app, using the Google Account that you used in the Play Store app at the time you downloaded the app. So, if you logged into your phone as Google Account X, then download Choice of Games, then try to “switch” to Google Account Y (perhaps by tapping the account switcher in the Play Store app), Google won’t tell CoG about your purchases on account Y; it continues to only tell us about the purchases for account X. To access account Y purchases, you have to uninstall the CoG app and reinstall it using account Y; then, you can only access your account Y purchases and not your account X purchases.
(They also refuse to tell us which Google account we’re talking to. Even if you use Sign in with Google, the user can choose any Google account for sign in, which may or may not match the Google account that they originally used to download the app.)
It’s very difficult for people to keep track of account mismatches, especially when they may have made their purchases years ago.
The old app had four features for purchase continuity:
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When you sign in (just as you sign in, right at that instant), we ask choiceofgames.com what you’ve already purchased.
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If you’ve signed in and not signed out, whenever you purchase something, we transfer your Google Play “order receipt” to choiceofgames.com. The website sends the receipt back to Google Play to make sure it’s genuine, and then choiceofgames.com stores the receipt in your choiceofgames.com account. That way, you can use as many Google accounts as you want; as long as you use the same choiceofgames.com account, we’ll track them all on our server.
But this creates a new opportunity for trouble: what if you have multiple choiceofgames.com accounts? If you’re logged in to choiceofgames.com as account P and transfer some receipts there, and later login as account Q, we won’t let you send your receipts to account Q, because they already belong to account P. (At that point, you have to contact customer support to merge your purchases together.)
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All the games have a “Restore Purchases” button. If you tap it, we first ask Google about everything you’ve purchased; if Google says you haven’t purchased the current game, we prompt you to sign in again (so we can restore your purchases from choiceofgames.com).
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If you tapped “Restore Purchases” on a game, but you still haven’t purchased the current game according to Google and choiceofgames.com, we used to show a message prompting you to try to transfer your purchase from the standalone app.
It was a very finicky process: you had to install the standalone app you purchased, then “Restore Purchases” in the omnibus; it would bounce you over to the standalone app, which would fetch your standalone purchase receipt and send it back to the omnibus, which would transfer it to choiceofgames.com. We’d verify the receipt and then credit your login on choiceofgames.com.
That feature doesn’t actually work any more, at least, not on Android 11 or higher (i.e. phones purchased in the last four years or so). And anyway, it was extremely annoying to use. If you had bought 20 games from us, you’d have to install all 20 standalone apps, and then tap “Restore Purchases” one at a time for each game.
It’s overwhelmingly easier to just send screenshots of your receipts to support@choiceofgames.com at that point. In fact, if you just tell us the email address of the Google Account that made the purchases, we can use the Google Play Developer Console to query for all of your purchases; no receipts necessary.
If you really want to do it yourself, you kinda still can: download each game, tap the menu icon, and Sign In. When you sign in to choiceofgames.com, we’ll transfer your standalone game receipt, and credit your web account.
The new app is slightly better in the following ways:
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The new app now stores your choiceofgames.com authentication credentials in “secure storage,” so, if you’re signed in, whenever you open the app, we automatically ask choiceofgames.com what you’ve purchased, in the background. If you purchase something on our web site (or purchase something on Steam and transfer your Steam purchases to choiceofgames.com), the new app should automatically notice your purchase, without requiring you to tap “Restore Purchases.”
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You can now go to Settings → Troubleshooting → Purchases to see technical details about all your purchases, including where you bought them (Google Play or web), a link to view your purchases in the Google Play Store, and, if we were unable to transfer your Google Play receipt to our website, you’ll see an error message here about that.
(We still have no direct way of knowing which Google Play account you’re using.)
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If you’re using Google Play Games, we store all of your game progress and achievements in there, so you can safely uninstall the app and reinstall it with a different Google account to access other receipts.
Unfortunately, the new app doesn’t provide a way to restore purchases from standalones (but the old app wasn’t actually able to do that either, anymore, so, it’s no worse than we were).