App Download error on Google Play

Just got an interesting support call: some apps would download, while others would not. Tried to look at it with the developers version of Raccoon and indeed, I could reproduce the problem (which turned out to be a strange coincidence in this case). Search worked, viewing details worked, but the actual APK download would fail with a HTTP 404 - Not Found for some random apps. Worse yet, among those random apps were some I had previously used for testing and they downloaded just fine back then. Ok, that’s odd. Is it a server glitch or Google messing things up again?

A HTTP 404 - Not Found happens during download, when the app is not compatible with the requesting device. This is slightly counter intuitive, since you’d rather expect something like HTTP 403 - Forbidden , but actually makes a lot of sense, considering that Play always gives you the latest compatible version, but in this case couldn’t find one. I tried the stupid thing: register a new GSF ID for the account and re-upload the device profile. Surprisingly, that did the trick.

So, it seems like Google lost my and the other user’s device profile at the same time without actually invalidating our GSF ID. This feels like some server side hiccup that will probably affect lots of people. Anyway, fix is to create a new profile in Raccoon and to clear caches on Android.