What does the Google Play notification SUBSCRIPTION_RECOVERED mean?

The Google Play notification SUBSCRIPTION_RECOVERED means a subscription came back from account hold or from a pause.

Quick facts#


Notification	`subscriptionNotification.notificationType` 1, `SUBSCRIPTION_RECOVERED`
Where	Google Play real-time developer notifications (Pub/Sub, `DeveloperNotification`)
Sent by	Google Play, as a Cloud Pub/Sub push to your endpoint
What Google says	A subscription was recovered from account hold or resumed from a pause.

What triggers it#

The customer fixed their payment method during account hold, and the retried payment worked. The purchase token stays the same.
A paused subscription resumed, at the end of the pause or because the customer resumed it by hand.
The billing date moves to the recovery date.

What your server should do#

Do not trust the message for the state. Google says a notification only tells you the purchase state changed; call the Google Play Developer API (purchases.subscriptionsv2.get) with the purchase token to get the full state.
Restore access and extend it to the new expiryTime.
Remove any fix-payment or paused message in your app.
Do not count it as a new subscriber.
Answer 2xx once you have handled the message, and skip a messageId you have seen: Google recommends checking the uniqueness of message IDs so a redelivery does not make a second API call.

Example#

JavaScript

// A Pub/Sub push body: the notification is base64 JSON in message.data.
const body = { message: { messageId: "136969346945", data: Buffer.from(JSON.stringify({"version":"1.0","packageName":"com.example.app","eventTimeMillis":"1790800914000","subscriptionNotification":{"version":"1.0","notificationType":1,"purchaseToken":"PURCHASE_TOKEN"}})).toString("base64") } };

function decide(body) {
  const n = JSON.parse(Buffer.from(body.message.data, "base64").toString("utf8"));
  if (!(n.subscriptionNotification?.notificationType === 1)) return "ignore";
  return "restore access, extend to the new expiryTime";
}

console.log(decide(body));

Run-checked: npm run check:snippets runs this snippet with Node and compares its output with restore access (checked 2026-10-03).

How RevenueDot handles it#

RevenueDot answers every handled message with 2xx and every temporary failure with 5xx so Pub/Sub redelivers it. For subscription types it re-reads the subscription from Google with purchases.subscriptionsv2.get and applies that state, and it acknowledges a new purchase if the app has not. A purchase RevenueDot has not seen is applied only when the app's Track new purchases from server-to-server notifications setting is on. A new order on a token whose access had ended is Google renewing it, so RevenueDot moves the stored end to now and sends RENEWAL, not a new purchase and not UNCANCELLATION.

Source#

Checked: 2026-10-03

Edit this page on GitHub ↗ View as Markdown Last updated October 3, 2026