Appmonger For All – Banishing Merchant Key Blues

One of the major limitations of Appmonger has been that it requires you to use your merchant ID and merchant key to authenticate with Google Checkout to download Android Market orders. At first glance this doesn’t appear to be a limitation at all – it is simply how Google requires clients to connect to the Order Report API. But for reasons that are not at all clear, Google does not provide merchant keys for all Checkout merchants. It seems that all US and UK accounts have merchant keys. In other countries some accounts do have this basic integration option but many don’t. As a result, the number one most requested feature for Appmonger has been for some alternative way to connect.

Finally we have a solution. Appmonger 2.1 provides the option to use your phone’s Google Account to authenticate with Google Checkout. Appmonger gets an authentication token from the Android AccountManager and then mimics what your browser does when you download CSV data manually from the Google Checkout website.

To use this new mechanism, select the “Google Account” radio button on the Checkout credentials screen. If there are no accounts listed (only accounts associated with Google Checkout are shown), you will need to add one.  This can be done from Appmonger (select “Add Google Account” from the app menu) or from the device’s settings (under “Accounts & Sync”).

You will need to grant Appmonger permission to use your Google account.

Users with a merchant key should probably continue to use that as it is Google’s officially supported way of integrating with Google Checkout and as such is less likely to break if Google changes something.