Roku Developer Program

[gearheads]

I am following the documentation on implementing in-channel purchasing of subscriptions. I have created by products in the Developer admin site and marked my app to be used for billing. Then in my app I call the ChannelStore to load my products. The products that are returned look like sample products, not the ones I defined. They have id's of PROD1, PROD2, and FAILPROD.

Where is this sample data coming from? What do I need to do to have my products load from the store?

[renojim]

You can only get those sample products when you side-load your channel. You have to create a private channel and add your products to it to see your products in your channel. It makes debugging harder, but at least you're getting real channel store interactions. You'll also want set up test users so you don't get charged for purchases.

-JT

[gearheads]

According to these docs: https://sdkdocs.roku.com/display/sdkdoc ... Purchasing you no longer have to create a private channel for testing. We should be able to use an existing channel as the source of our products and then side-load the app for testing.

In the past it was common to test billing using a published private channel. This meant that you had no access to the debug console to see debugging information, set breakpoints, etc. Now that you can test using a side-loaded channel, this problem has been addressed.

[renojim]

Well that's new! I hadn't seen that and haven't tried it, but I'd have to say that since you're getting the old sample products that something isn't set up quite right (or it doesn't work as documented which isn't all that uncommon for Roku).

-JT

[gearheads]

I did find a work around. Initially I was working with a test user account on my device. This test user was created in the roku admin website and assigned to my app. When I loaded the app, I got the sample products.

But then I switched my Roku device to use my developer account instead of a test account. This time when I loaded the app, I got my products like I expected. Looks like the documentation may be incorrect about test users being able to test billing products.