How to remove Subscription from product list in developer console and what will be its effect on the old subscribed users?

Question

I want to remove the existing subscription product from product list.

How would I be able to perform so as I didn't found any option on my developer console to delete the subscriptions ?

Also if in any way possible it is allowed, then will it have any effect on the existing users who have purchased that subscription when they call for RESTORE_TRANSACTION from their app while communicating with Google Play ?

Shillyshally

You can delete the subscription before adding a base plan but not after. – Strikebreaker

Answer 1

UPD: It's possible to deactivate subscription since may 2022. See mbwasi answer

Unfortunately, It's not possible to remove a subscription product from the product list of the developer console. You can just remove the subscription product from the product list offered in your app to prevent users from seeing or purchasing it.

Wardship

Does anyone know if this prevents them from auto-renewing? I have a subscription that now comes free with my app and I do not want users who previously paid for the subscription to automatically renew. – Fare

@Fare no, it doesn't prevent your previous users from auto-renewing. Once they bought an item/service via subscription you responsible to provide it as long as subscription are valid from their/google side. However you can gracefully tell your subscribers about free subscription and let them do it manually from myApps settings in Google Play app. – Hatred

The documentation says you can use the Merchant Center (or the GPlay Dev API) to cancel their subscriptions. The item will remain but at least they won't be paying for it. – Pint

Four years later, is this still the case? – Cheka

@JoelBrewer this is unfortunately still the case. This actually makes zero sense to me, simply because we can remove an in-app product but we can't remove an in-app subscription. Moreover we all know how low the adoption rate of an update on Android is, so if you want to remove a subscription you need to hope that they'd adopt it very quickly, otherwise all you can do is to refund every purchase which is ridiculous – Smallclothes

It's Google I/O 2018... and still that's what google replies: 1. For Existing Users: you'll need to manually (using the api - developer.android.com/.../billing_subscriptions) cancel their subscription, otherwise google will keep billing them. 2. For new users: Just remove the app logic which offers an in app subscription . – Leeann

Not being able to delete it is RIDICULOUS, I hope they're aware of this.... – Cementation

Before calling it ridiculous, lets think here for a moment about the complexities involved in deleting subscriptions that are sold. A simple use case, million users bought 1 year subscription at various different time, how can you delete a subscription until all users subscription ends? This is way too much overhead to compute who's subscription expires when before giving you delete option. App developers can easily not offer/show that subscription is way straightforward for Google to avoid unnecessary maintenance that provide little inconvenience. – Mullet

I didn't release my app yet, created a wrong subscription and can't remove it now. Wtf. If there is not some one subscribed, should be deletable. – Publicly

what the... I was creating my in-app products again because I wanted to have same id that I had in iOS and now I ended app with 2 subscriptions. Now I have to apply some logic from my app? This is just stupid – Preachment

You can ignore them in the list, but the worse, that I only found out today in the release, is that their pricing will also show in the Play Store In app purchases pricing range. I had a dev really expensive product (like a year long subscription test), and it was included in that range. Cheez, today was a day of mini panic attacks. I changed the pricing to the lowest possible, and after some mins it took effect. I talked to google via chat in console, but I don't expect them to fix that or even just my issue. – Publicly

Wow, 8 years, and still the same broken experience. Google nailed it ! – Frontwards

I can't believe this, I made an additional in-app subscription for a test bc of some other Google API issue, and now I am stuck with this stupid extra product.....Should be able to delete it if there were no purchases yet at least. I can't even deactivate it... – Honan

At the very least, you should be able to hide disabled subscriptions that have no active subscribers... It's a matter of housekeeping! At the very least, not making them visible in the store as some people here have pointed out. Why would users need to know about a subscription thats nolonger available for sale? – Tenebrae

Answer 2

Since the introduction of the new subscription setup in May 2022 it is now at least possible to deactivate the base plan of the subscription making it unavailable to new users, the mess in the console remains as I created a bunch of test-subscriptions which I can't hide or get rid off. https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/140504?hl=en#zippy=%2Cdeactivate-or-reactivate-a-base-plan

It seems you can also change price and move users over according to this
https://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/price-changes

Gca