My app seems ready to get a \'real life\' test for an in-app purchase procedure on my device. However, I receive an \"The publisher cannot purchase this item\" error message in
I solved this error by
Meanwhile, I have helped myself by changing the SKU ID to "android.test.purchased" (see http://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_testing.html ) that allows to "kind of" walk through the purchase process and play a bit around with it.
However, this is not a smooth solution in my opinion and only partially satisfying as the developer doesn't see what a 'real' user sees and experiences, but rather receives some result codes from a black box with a fake name (it is even titled that way) and can't make it beyond the Google Play interface.
For all those who are still stuck with this annoying feature, there's a solution with the newest version of android (5+ Lollipop).
Simple solution 1. Go to settings, then scroll down to "Users" 2. Add a new test user. 3. Open the app with this user
You can now test you're in app purchases with a test user.
Here's an attempt to put all the requirements into one answer. This is the simplest process that worked for me:
Summarizing my own pitfalls:
make sure that device version and market version are signed by the same release key
make sure that market version number is not smaller than one defined in the build gradle
A developer cannot purchase anything from herself. To fully test, you will need to create a test account in the Developer Console and then install your app on a device where that is the primary account. There is no other way. See http://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_testing.html