can't disable re-subscription for android subscription on Play Store

Question

TL;DR

Why can our users re-subscribe on Play Store, despite opting-out of this on Google Play console?

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we are implementing a subscription on our Android app. we have selected the "resubscribe" option to be "not enabled".

yet, when we test this by canceling our subscription, and waiting until after the previous subscription has expired, the user has an option for some time to re-subscribe directly from the Play Store, and not the app ("out-of-app purchase"), before their former subscription disappears completely.

When this happens our BE gets notified, BUT WITHOUT ANY INFORMATIONS ABOUT THE USERS IDENTITY, as this is an entirely new purchase, so our BE doesn't know which user to entitle to the re-subscribed plan.

I will note that we do not want to rely on our mobile app to intercept this purchase and update our backend - as the subscription affects the entitlement on our website as well, and we have no certainty as to when our app will be launched next.

This "re-subscribe" option has been disabled on our Google Play dev console, and it does seem to disappear after ~1-3 hours (on test environment), but for that time gap we can't prevent users from "re-subscribing" on Play Store

Answer 1

Currently (August, 2022) there is a way to disable it on a per subscription basis through the console. Go to your app in the Google Play Console and then into

Monetize > Products > Subscriptions

From there you can individual go into your subscriptions clicking on

View Subscription > View Base Plan

On that page there is a drop down that is labeled Resubscribe. Check that to "Don't Allow" and make sure you hit the "Save Changes" button.

You must do this for each of your subscriptions to prevent that the resubscribe button being available AFTER the users subscription expires. There is no way that I know of to get rid of the re-subscribe button before the subscription expires, though that senario can be handled through webhooks/requerying the subscription you have stored.