How to use my own Production Android App without Purchasing In-App-Billing Items

Question

Not a "how to test in-app-billing" question!!

Initially, I did not think this limitation would cause me any grief:

However, now that my application is in production and I frequently find myself providing a live demo on my device to someone, I find this to be a large enough inconvenience that I need a workaround. It's embarrassing to inform a potential large customer, that I can't show them all features on this device because I am the main developer. They just hear Bla Blah blah - something this guy wrote doesn't work.

How do others go about using the in-app products on their own device for their own app? I'd rather not carry around another device. I tried adding a second account to my device but somehow Android/Google still knows it is tied to my account / I am the publisher (maybe because my Gmail address is listed as a recovery account?) I can think of a dozen ways to give myself a back door and make everything free, but all of those options open up potential security holes. At this point, I'm considering a special APK / Build that I will manually create and install on my device only that always returns "true" when checking if a product is purchased or not.

Answer 1

The most common answer which most developers do is have a different account for publishing their app from their personal account. They then add their personal account as a user on the developer account For app publishing, the account has an awful lot of power. Creating a new gmail account to use for the developer console is not too hard.

So I might have nickssoftware@gmail.com as my Play Console account owner, and nick@gmail.com (both made up addresses) as the account on my phone. The Play Console account never gets added to any phone.