"Unable to auto-initialize connection" message on Android (and some suggestions)

[cwhenderson20]

Description

First, thank you all of the work you do on this module! It's immensely helpful! Unfortunately, I am seeing thousands of promise rejections from Android devices with the message Unable to auto-initialize connection. I noticed that others have reported this (#2183, #1958), but there's not enough information in there to help me figure out what's going on. For what it's worth, I believe this is mostly just a warning message. I haven't seen this interfering with purchasing rates on Android.

For context, I am using the withIAPContext HOC at the top level of my app, and then a hook that attaches an onPurchaseUpdated listener in order to act on changes to the latest purchase.

Simplified, that hook looks like this:

import { purchaseUpdatedListener } from 'react-native-iap'

function usePurchaseUpdatedListener() {
  const { connected } = useIAP();

  useEffect(() => {
    if (!connected) {
      return;
    }

    async function onPurchaseUpdated(purchase: Purchase) {
      // do some async things like fetching data here...
    }

    const purchaseUpdatedSubscription = purchaseUpdatedListener(onPurchaseUpdated);

    return () => {
      purchaseUpdatedSubscription.remove();
    }
  }, [connected])
}

And here's the stacktrace I see in Bugsnag:

Error Unable to auto-initialize connection 
    node_modules/react-native/Libraries/BatchedBridge/NativeModules.js:105:50 promiseMethodWrapper
    node_modules/react-native-iap/src/eventEmitter.ts:62:4 purchaseUpdatedListener
    src/data/billing/hooks.ts:218:6 anonymous
    ...

So I looked into it a bit, and purchaseUpdatedListener comes from eventEmitter.ts. The relevant lines are:

if (isAndroid) {
  getAndroidModule().startListening();
}

…which then calls startListening from RNIapModule.kt. That calls sendUnconsumedPurchases, which calls ensureConnection, which is where this Unable to auto-initialize connection message originates. Ultimately, I don't understand how all of the native code works well enough to make a diagnosis to the root cause, but one thing that I find somewhat strange is that the getAndroidModule.startListening() method supposedly returns a Promise, but that I, on the consumer side, have no way to catch errors that may be thrown from that Promise. I suspect this is why the error goes uncaught.

Maybe the code should be modified to either handle the potential rejection internally (if it really is innocuous):

if (isAndroid) {
  getAndroidModule().startListening().catch(e => console.warn(e));
}

You could also bubble it up to the user, but given the fact that the purchaseUpdatedListener function already returns an EventEmitter subscription, maybe an errorCallback as a second parameter that would be called in the case of an error would work:

export const purchaseUpdatedListener = (
  listener: (event: Purchase) => void,
  errorCallback?: (error: unknown) => void,
) => {
  //... 
  if (isAndroid) {
    getAndroidModule().startListening().catch(error => {
      if (errorCallback) {
        errorCallback(error);
      } else {
        throw error;
      }
    });
  }

  return emitterSubscription;
};

// ...

const purchaseUpdateSubscription =
      purchaseUpdatedListener(onPurchaseUpdated , (error) => console.warn(error));

Though this certainly has its drawbacks as well (mixing three separate async paradigms [events, promises, callback]).

Again, thank you for this module, it's been instrumental in offering subscriptions to users. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the above.

Environment:

• react-native-iap: 12.02
• react-native: 0.70.6
• Platform: Android

[andresesfm]

It makes sense to have the option to catch the error or ignore it. This is a bug

[cwhenderson20]

Thanks for the reply! I'm most curious why it's happening in the first place, given that I seem to be following all of the guidelines around connection status, but having the option to silently ignore it would be nice.

[andresesfm]

How about something like

export const purchaseUpdatedListener = (
  listener: (event: Purchase) => void,
  handleAndroidConnectionFailure: (reason: any) => any = () => {},
) => {
  //...
  if (isAndroid) {
    getAndroidModule().startListening().catch(handleAndroidConnectionFailure);
  }
//...
};

In that way, it has a default value so it's not a breaking change

[cwhenderson20]

Sure, that works. Though I think that re-throwing the error from inside the Promise technically retains the previous behavior, which is that the error will go uncaught rather than swallowed.

[andresesfm]

Upon further research, I went with: #2268.

[andresesfm]

Released as 12.8.0 Thank you @cwhenderson20. Please let us know if any other issues

[ramakula]

This issue is back again on version 12.13.0. We had to rollback because if impacted our android subscriptions, we had 100s instances of this error: we ended up rolling back to 12.10.8, this is the version .

There is no specific device or android version combination.

Unable to auto-initialize connection:

[moritzkarliczek]

Same for us. We also experience this issue again with version 12.13.1.