Google is currently in the process of replacing the Google Checkout merchant centre with the new Google Wallet. Some users have already received this update and are reporting that Appmonger is no longer working for them due to the changes.

Unfortunately we do not currently have access to the new Google Wallet merchant centre and are therefore not yet able to investigate what changes are necessary to get Appmonger to work with the new site. At the very least it appears that it will require changes to authentication and support for the new sales report format.

Until we are transitioned to the new service, which could take several days or more, this work cannot start. In the meantime we have temporarily removed Appmonger from the Google Play store to avoid selling to users for whom it will not work.

For further updates, please follow @RectangularHQ on Twitter or subscribe to this blog.

Following on from last week’s 2.3.0 release of Appmonger, the Google Play app seller’s app, today we’ve got some more improvements. As well as some refinements to the previous Android 4.x support there is also a new option to override your device’s default time zone and display reports using the time zone of your choice. However, the change that will probably of interest to most users is the improved order reconciliation.

Order reconciliation in Appmonger is the process by which previously downloaded orders are updated when more accurate financial information becomes available. It is necessary because the near-real-time data from Google Checkout that Appmonger uses only contains amounts in the buyer’s currency. Appmonger therefore uses third-party exchange rates to estimate the amounts in the seller’s currency. The small inaccuracies introduced by this process accumulate over time and make the overall reports less accurate. Fortunately Google Play’s monthly payout reports provide a second source of data that we can use to correct these figures. The Appmonger reconciliation process checks for new payout reports and uses the data to update its local order records.

Unfortunately, before today the reconciliation process was not a complete solution since the orders in the Google Play payout reports do not map neatly to the data in the Google Checkout reports. Those orders in the payout report that reference the Google Checkout order ID could be matched, but there were many others that could not be reconciled. Version 2.3.1 of Appmonger fixes this by making sense of the various different types of ID used in the payout reports. Some of these refer to a merchant ID that is present for some but not all orders in the Google Checkout data. In order to make the necessary connections Appmonger now stores this merchant ID when it is present. This means that if you want the new version to reconcile your previously downloaded orders, you will need to delete the app’s data and download them again so that this extra information is obtained.

Version 2.3.0 of Appmonger is now available  from Google Play.

This version updates the user interface for Android 4.x (Ice Cream Sandwich and JellyBean). It also includes fixes for a couple of issues. The reconciliation process, which had stopped functioning following changes to Google’s publisher console, should now work again. This release also fixes a problem with a missing pie chart legend when sharing PNG chart images on some devices.

One final point to note, if you are still using the old version of the Google Play publisher console, the reconciliation process will switch you to using version 2 the first time you run it (this is a side effect of retrieving your developer ID). Your ID will be cached after this and you can switch back to the old version of the publisher console the next time you login to it.

Several users of Appmonger have reported problems downloading exchange rates in the last day or so. This is because the site that Appmonger uses for exchange rates has been offline (whether this is due to the ongoing weather problems in the US that have taken several sites down or some other problem is unclear).

This is not the first time that the exchange rate provider has been unavailable so, to prevent such outages causing problems again in future, I’ve just published a small update to Appmonger (version 2.2.13) that will fall-back to downloading cached exchange rates from rectangularsoftware.com if the primary source is unavailable. Please install this update from Google Play and hopefully you will not encounter these problems any more.

On the subject of further updates to Appmonger, several users have asked about when the app will be updated for Android 4.x so that it does not appear out-dated on newer phones. This update is imminent but has not been tested so was not included in today’s new build. It will be with you shortly.

Google today announced that Google Play now supports four additional countries from which developers can publish paid Android apps. These countries are the Czech Republic, Israel, Mexico and Poland. With these four new countries come four new currencies in which apps can be sold.

Appmonger, Rectangular Software’s app for tracking Android app sales on Google Play, already had support for three of these new currencies but we failed to anticipate Google’s support for Czech crowns so today we’ve published version 2.2.9 that fixes this.

This new version also includes a few other minor enhancements including fixes to the reconciliation functionality to address Google’s recent changes to Google Play sales reports. There are also some changes underneath the covers that may not be particularly visible at the moment but will become more obvious with the upcoming release of Appmonger 2.3.

On Thursday evening I received a message on Twitter drawing my attention to a new app on Android Market that bore an uncanny resemblance to Rectangular Software’s own Appmonger app for tracking app sales on Android Market. And by “uncanny resemblance” I mean “almost entirely identical”. So much so that both myself and other Appmonger users who looked at it were convinced that the distributor of this app had downloaded the Appmonger .apk, removed the licensing protection, made a few cosmetic changes and republished it under their own name. The feature set and UI structure were identical, the on-screen labels matched word-for-word and the charts were in most cases visually so close as to be almost indistinguishable. The final insult was that the app was made available as a free download whereas Appmonger sells for £2.49 / $3.99.

The motivation for cracking a niche paid app and giving it away for free is not at all clear. It would have required a fair bit of effort since the Appmonger code is obfuscated. The person responsible had not added any adverts so they did not stand to derive any direct financial benefit from their actions. Perhaps they had added some malware to the app?

A visit to the website linked from Android Market revealed that the perpetrator is a woman in Texas. As well as promoting the app, the website included a support page that was remarkably similar to the Appmonger FAQ on the Rectangular Software website (question titles were identical but the answers had been reworded slightly).

On her blog she claimed to have spent $4,152.11 on developing “her” new app (seemingly the first and so far only app that she has released). On the surface this was an odd claim for an apparently pirated app. I could at least confirm that she had spent $3.99 because a search in Google Checkout revealed that the same person had legitimately purchased a copy of Appmonger on October 21^st 2011.

Takedown

At this point, convinced that Rectangular Software was the victim of pretty blatant code theft, I filed DMCA takedown notices with Android Market and the woman’s web host. Within 24 hours Google had pulled the app from Android Market and the web host had removed the offending pages from her website.

The Plot Thickens

When I later had time to analyse the suspect app more closely, I discovered that things weren’t quite as they had originally seemed. Playing around with the app on an old phone (I didn’t trust it on my phone), I noticed that the whole experience had more rough edges than Appmonger. If this was modified Rectangular Software code then the modifications had been done clumsily and introduced issues that weren’t there previously. Digging around in the .apk, the structure of the app was not as familiar as I expected it to be. If this was modified Rectangular Software code then they had gone to some lengths to try to disguise that fact. Furthermore, I discovered that this app uses achartengine to generate at least some of its charts whereas Appmonger uses custom chart classes that I wrote myself. That at least explains why the line charts look different between the two apps.

There are enough differences for me to entertain the possibility that the person distributing this app did actually pay somebody to build it from scratch and what we’re looking at is a very uninspired clone rather than a pirated and modified version of the original Appmonger. Though why on earth anybody would spend thousands of dollars going to such lengths and not at least try to make something a bit different is beyond me.

On the other hand, there are also certain similarities that would be unlikely to occur without reverse engineering of the original app, particularly in regards to the back end services and the database (all table, column and index names are identical between the two apps except for a few extra columns in the clone).

Anybody is free to create an alternative Google Checkout reporting app and give it away for free if they so choose. As a competitor I might not like it but I’d have little cause for complaint. However, regardless of whether or not it includes any Rectangular Software code, this app takes the sincerest form of flattery to ludicrous extremes.

Following on from adding Google accounts authentication in Appmonger 2.1, version 2.2 moves on to the next most requested feature – the ability to alias and/or group apps for reporting purposes.

There are two use cases that this new feature addresses. Firstly, when you translate your app into different languages the translated names show up in Appmonger as separate apps. This is because the data from Google Checkout does not include the app’s package name so there is no way for Appmonger to reliably infer which different app names refer to the same app. You can now assign the same alias to each of these translated names and they will be grouped together as one app.

Similarly, you can now organise your apps into groups. By assigning the same alias to different apps you can treat them as a single entity for reporting purposes. For example, some developers release several different variations of the same basic app and might want their reports to show the combined figures rather than figures for each individual variant. This is now possible.

To assign aliases to apps, simply select the “Groups/Aliases” option from the main Appmonger menu and then tap on each app that you want to enter an alias for.

Appmonger 2.2 is available now on Android Market.

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.

Many Appmonger users have been in touch to say that they are having problems with Appmonger not displaying all of their recent orders. The problem is that Google Checkout is not including these orders in the CSV data that Appmonger downloads, even though it is showing the orders in the orders inbox on the Google Checkout web interface. This has happened a couple of times in the past and usually the situation has been rectified within 6 to 12 hours with the orders eventually reappearing.

On this occasion the problem has persisted for a couple of days. Some users have no orders from the last 24 hours, some have no orders for a longer period, and some have the recent orders but are missing orders from previous days.

Unfortunately this problem is not something that Rectangular Software is able to do anything about. If Google Checkout provides the data, Appmonger will display it. We are assuming that Google will rectify this problem shortly, as it has done in the past. Your orders have not been lost (as you can see, they are in the orders inbox) and should become available to Appmonger in due course.

Update (13th July 2011 11:00 BST): Google Checkout appears to be back to normal now. If your orders haven’t already reappeared they should do shortly.

Appmonger, the Android app for keeping track of your Android Market sales, has had a bit of an overhaul for version 2.0 (available now from the Android Market). The most obvious change is the look of the app. We’ve changed from white-on-black to a black-on-white theme and we’ve chosen the colours to better match the app icon that Spiderfly Studios designed for us previously.

Perhaps even more fundamental, the mechanism for changing which chart you are looking at has changed. No longer do you need to perform a long press on the chart itself; instead there is a button on the title bar that serves the same purpose. The reason for this change is twofold: the old way was not obvious and we are now free to attach different touch functionality to the charts.

Pie charts now have scrollable legends, which means we don’t have to make the pie tiny to fit all of the items on screen.  Line charts and bar charts have also been improved with grid lines and more axis labels to make it easier to read off values.

The orders list view has a new context menu. Long-press an order and you will be given a list of related actions. In this version the only action is the option to view the order on the Google Checkout website but we envisage adding more actions in future releases.

In addition, background fetching is now more intelligent for users on WiFi connections and flag icons have been added for almost 100 additional countries, with high-res versions for users on HDPI screens.