Crash with null pointer exception after Billing Service gets disconnected

After successful setup and the establishment of a connection to the Billing Service in

IabHelper.startSetup()

The user tries to make an in-app purchase.

IabHelper.launchPurchaseFlow()

gets called which in turn calls methods on mService. But sometimes

IabHelper.onServiceDisconnected()

has been called in the meantime which sets

IabHelper.mService = null

This causes a null pointer exception.

It seems unpredictable when/why this disconnection happens. But I have some pre-launch reports in my developer console as examples.

Would be resolved by: https://github.com/googlesamples/android-play-billing/pull/46

[dec1]

IabHelper is obsolete

Does it say this somewhere clearly? Presumably it should. Its amazing how confusing the documentation is.

billing_integrate.html still describes using the old IabHelper and IInAppBillingService.aidl

Whereas for example billling_library.html describes using the new BillingClient.

The github example both reference, contains both a “TrivialDrive” and “TrivialDrive_v2” subdir, each of which simply describe themselves as

Sample for In-App Billing version 3

Even though billing/versions.html shows version 5 to be current since Feb 2015 TrivialDrive_v2 doesn’t state how/why it differs from TrivialDrive, and why TrivialDrive is still there at all (is TrivialDrive obsolete? Are there valid reasons to still use TrivialDrive? Is TrivialDrive_v2 not finished yet?)

And this on top of how hard it is to get the sample working anyways (setting up your own in-app products in developer console, modifying the app to reflect this, only working with signed release etc). A bit more clarity here could save many 1000s of developers many frustrating hours

[d-schmidt]

billling_library.html feels unfinished as well.

Why does the chapter ‘Retrieve existing purchases’ describe and show ‘Google Play calls the onPurchasesUpdated() method to deliver the result of the purchase operation’? How is this relevant? Is it called on service connect?
Only in the last sentence it states: ‘You can also query Google Play to quickly retrieve the list of purchases and subscriptions that the user made.’ It fails to mention how.

Three chapters down we learn you should use queryPurchases() and could use queryPurchaseHistoryAsync() but neither triggers above callback.
The difference between these two methods is also not explained in depth. The first uses the local Play Service cache, the second does some kind of net call but is only able to retrieve the very last transaction. When is the cache refreshed? Is there a use case for the seconds method? Is the first unsafe?

I tried to re-implement billing because of the NPEs. I hate trial and error, and not just the annoying, impossible to really test billing. The docs suck. I’m irritated.