I recently had to move an Android app from one Google Play Developer account to a newer one that was created to match a new formal entity at work. During the transfer attempts of the app, I noticed this weird error:
the transaction ID does not match for this developer account
The error is stating that the transaction ID that I was using to verify who the receiver of the app would be, was not correct while I actually followed Google’s support steps precisely.
TL;DR
Remove the text before the “registration-” string if you have the same long ID as I had (the text in the blue box is the text from the ID you need to copy and use for the transfer request):
Preparing Your Transfer
When you Google around to find out how to move an app, you quickly end up on this support page by Google:
Starting from top to bottom this guides you through a “checklist” of things that you need to do before you can transfer an app.
The fun begins
As soon as you reach the “Submit your transfer request and click on the link to start the actual transfer request (which can take up to 2 business days to be processed), you’ll quickly encounter the issue that makes up the long but clear title of this post.
I logged into the developer account of the current owner of the app. I clicked on the “submit your transfer request” link and filled out the information that I know from memory (like the full name and email address of the target developer account that will receive the app after the transfer).
Then there
As step 4 of the beforementioned support page indicates, you can find this ID in the payment email that you’ve received after purchasing the Google Play Developer Account ($25,00).
As I later found out, this email can be found most quickly by searching for the sender’s email address:
payments-noreply@google.com
I did this and the transaction ID didn’t resemble the examples from step 4 in the support page.
The example codes:
My transaction code:
Naive as I were, I copied the whole code and pasted it into the transfer form.
That’s when I noticed I kept receiving the dreaded error:
The transaction ID does not match for this developer account
Even after Googling and trying to prefix the code with “PDS.” (as indicated in this Stack Overflow answer), I kept getting the same error.
How Fix the transaction ID error?
The solution isn’t documented, but I got this working for me…
I decided to remove the part before the registration word in the code.
So, by copy-pasting everything from registration-….0988 and pasting it in, the form accepted the code and my request was being put in the queue.
See the text in the blue box in my example. That is the code part you need to copy (starting with the “r” from registration and ending with the 8 on the end… the text is shown on two lines but there is no linebreak in there):
This is f*cked up?!
It is really strange to me to see that the format of the code is different from what the official support page indicated and that the process was blocked by not accepting the new variant.
Did it work?
The request is currently in the queue and will be processed within a couple of workdays. I’ll update this post to see if this actually is a confirmed solution.
I just hope this helps others and prevents them from wasting as much time as I did finding out how to get this “simple transfer” done.
Take care! ✌?
This post was also released on Medium.
Code Hard, Ship Harder – Shipharder.com
