And Google broke Raccoon… again

I’m getting a lot of email at the moment about Raccoon suddenly being unable to log into Play, so instead of answering them individually, I’ll just address the issue here.

What happened? Well, in a nutshell, the same thing that always happens once or twice a year: Google got it in their head that something must be done differently from now on and everyone is screwed. More concretely, they changed the way in which clients must request their Auth token (put simply: a cookie that is used instead of username and password). Clients already having a token (being authenticated) are not (yet) affected. That is, if you set up Raccoon before around a week or so, everything is peachy (for the moment). Just don’t change your password/account settings, or you won’t be able to log in again.

So far, I have spent the better half on the weekend on the issue (thanks Google, did you really have to pull this off during the pentecostal holiday?), a fairly good idea what’s broken and a also halfway working solution. I still have to do additional research (hope, everyone else is having a fine holiday) and then spend a day or so on making a clean implementation.

In the meantime, here’s what you can do:

  1. From the menubar, select Help|Unlock features
  2. Complete the checkout process
  3. Wait for Raccoon 4.1.1 to be released

Wait! Whoah! What? Why spent money on something that’s broken?!

Look at it this way: you are not spending money on something that is broken, you are spending money on getting it fixed (over the holidays – did I already mention Pentecost, by the way?) Think of it as Kickstarter, with the difference being that I have been doing this for about 4 years now and have always delivered so far!

Posted in Android, Coding