Error and Solution: Subscription/Purchase Issue on Android with react-native-iap

[diegoleondev]

Error:

{
 "code": "PROMISE_BUY_ITEM", 
 "debugMessage": "The sku was not found. Please fetch products first by calling getItems", 
 "message": "The sku was not found. Please fetch products first by calling getItems",
 "productId": "offer-id"
}

Possible Solution

In my case, I have an abstraction layer that standardizes the response for products across iOS, Android, and my backend.

• On iOS, the response returns an array of plans.
• On Android, it returns an array of catalogs, each containing their respective plans.

The function I use consolidates these responses into the following unified structure:

export interface Plan {
  id: string; // iOS: productId, Android: lineItems[0].offerDetails.basePlanId
  semanticId: string;
  price: string;
  currency: string;
  period: number;
}

export interface Catalog {
  id: string; // iOS: subscriptionGroupIdentifier, Android: productId
  semanticId: string;
  plans: Plan[];
}

When subscribing on iOS, everything works smoothly:

requestSubscription({ sku: plan.id, ...(...) });

However, on Android, the error mentioned above occurs. This happens because the requestSubscription function in Android expects the group ID as the sku, not the plan (or offer) ID. As a result, the purchase fails.

To solve this issue, I added a payload property to the plan structure. This property contains the necessary information to perform a purchase on each platform.

type AndroidPayload = {
  platform: 'android';
  sku: string; // Android: productId (groupId)
  token: string;
};

type IOSPayload = {
  platform: 'ios';
  sku: string; // iOS: productId (planId)
};

export interface Plan {
  semanticId: string;
  price: string;
  currency: string;
  period: number;
  payload: AndroidPayload | IOSPayload;
}

const { platform, ...payload } = plan.payload; 
requestSubscription(payload);

Conclusion

On Android, passing the offer ID as the sku in requestSubscription will result in an error. Instead, you need to pass the group ID, which is what Android requires to process the purchase.