I purchased the MLB At Bat app, on my Verizon Galaxy S5, on Wednesday and I listened to some baseball audio only to discover it was claiming I didn’t have a subscription on Thursday. Being a programmer, I took the normal steps to debug an app issue. I restarted my phone. I cleared the app’s cache. I uninstalled and reinstalled the app. Nothing. I tried in a web browser on a computer and when that didn’t work I realized it must be something with my account and purchase.
So what has to have happened is that my purchase worked fine, I listened to some of the Tigers on Wednesday, and then my auto-renewal from last year kicked in, which I’d purchased on the same date, afterwards and in some way that double attempt at connecting to the MLB.com account borked it all.
I actually talked it through on Twitter with @MLBFanSupport and they ended up telling me “talk to Google” which wasn’t particularly helpful.
The recept reviews of the app in the app store speak to a similar problem.
So here’s what I did.
1. I canceled my auto-renewal subscription.
2. I then clicked ‘report a problem’ on my Google Play order history for the app, claiming it was defective. in the text I explained that it wasn’t activating in the app and that cancelling it seemed to be the only way to fix it.
3. They refunded me pretty fast; I got an email saying my purchase had been refunded.
4. I then repurchased the subscription, via the app itself. I clicked the audio tag at the top of the scoreboard. I selected ‘season subscription’, logging into my mlb.com account and putting in my Google password for the purchase from the Play Store.
5. And then it worked.
6. I then went into my Play store purchase history and canceled the auto-renewal of the subscription, so I don’t deal with this again next year. I have to download a 2017 update to the app anyway, so I might as well manually click the subscribe button again then.