Say you download an Android app or game from the Google Play Store, tinker with it for a little while and decide you won’t actually use it — or worse yet, that it doesn’t fully support your device?
Up until recently you’ve had up to 15 minutes to request a refund… which is barely enough time to finish downloading some large games, let alone testing them.
Now Google has changed its policy: you can request a refund for up to 2 hours after installing a paid app.
As Android Police notes, this seems to have been Google’s unofficial policy for at least the past few months. But now Google’s support website has been updated to make it clear that you’ve got 2 hours to request a refund.
To get a refund, just go to the Google Play Store, find the app you’ve installed, and hit the Refund button. After 2 hours the Refund button becomes an Uninstall button and pressing it will remove the app from your device, but you won’t get your money back.
A couple of hours should give you enough time to figure out if an app is worth the asking price… although it’s not quite as good as the 24 hours Google used to give you to request a refund way back in Android’s early days.
This is better, but I’ve already bought at least one game (The Bard’s Tale) with a nearly 4GB data file download required before playing which, on the wifi I was using that night, took 3 hours to download. We’d already played the low-res version on the PS2 so we already knew we liked it, but as more and more console games start making Android appearances, I suspect this 2 hour limit will appear to shrink faster than bandwidth improves for many of us living outside large-ish cities.
Of course, there are still ways to try most games without racing the Google Play limit… just not for those of us who prefer to stay above-board.
Excellent!
15 minutes simply wasn’t enough time to make an accurate assessment of many apps/games, sometimes because of downloading additional content.
This is a much more fair solution.