Japan alternative payment refunds land on your desk on both stores, and each one has to be reported back to Apple or Google

Japan alternative payment refunds are now your job on iPhone and Android alike. Apple opened alternative payment processing in Japan with iOS 26.2 in December 2025, and Google Play's billing choice program reached Japanese users on September 30, 2026. Both stores made the same trade. You can take the payment yourself, and the refund, the support ticket and the chargeback come with it. The part most teams miss is the paperwork: every refund you grant still has to be reported back to the store that let you sell.

What changed in Japan, and when

Japan's Mobile Software Competition Act, the MSCA, came into force in December 2025 for the companies it designates, Apple and Google among them. Google says it worked with the Japan Fair Trade Commission for 18 months on its response. Apple shipped its changes the same week. The dates below come from the two companies' own pages.

Neither store let you drop its own checkout. Apple requires In-App Purchase to stay available alongside any alternative option. Google requires Google Play Billing to be offered side by side with your billing or your web link. One app, two checkouts, and two different refund desks.

Who handles Japan alternative payment refunds

The short answer is that the store handles refunds for purchases it processed, and you handle the rest. A buyer who paid through Apple In-App Purchase can still ask Apple for a refund. A buyer who paid through your processor can't.

What Apple says

Apple's Japan page is direct. For purchases made through alternative payments, Apple won't be able to assist customers with refunds, purchase history, subscription management, and other issues, and you'll be responsible for addressing them with customers directly. It also makes you responsible for complying with the laws on payment processing, cancellations and refunds. Your payment service provider must be PCI Level 1 compliant and must run a customer service process that covers disputes, subscription management and refunds.

What Google says

Google's billing choice rules spell out three duties. You must offer refund methods for users who complete transactions outside Play, unless the user was clearly told before purchase that the transaction is non-refundable. You must provide customer support for those purchases. And your billing system must give users a way to dispute unauthorized transactions. Google also wants links where users can view their order history, manage subscriptions and start a refund request.

The two evidence flows don't exist here

On store billing, only two refund flows ask you for evidence: Apple's CONSUMPTION_REQUEST, which gives you 12 hours to send consumption data, and Google Play's chargeback review through orders.reviewrefund, which gives you 24 hours. Both exist because the store took the payment. A purchase paid through your own processor never triggers either one. When a Japanese buyer disputes that charge, the case runs between your processor and their bank, and the bank's decision is final.

How to report a refund back to Apple or Google

Granting the refund is half the work. Both stores take a cut of alternative payments, so both want to see the money that went back.

Apple's refund line items

In the External Purchase Server API, a refund is its own line item of type REFUND. It names the transaction that was refunded, the date you completed the refund, the amounts with and without tax in milli-units of your reporting currency, and a net amount that Apple describes as accounting for all refunds and restatements. Apple's line item page adds one sentence that matters for disputes: report chargebacks as a refund.

If you get a line wrong, Apple expects a correction. You resend the same lineItemId with restatement set to true, and Apple uses only the latest version. A line sent in error is withdrawn by also setting erroneouslySubmitted to true.

Google's refund call

On Google Play, you call refundexternaltransaction against the externalTransactionId you reported for the sale. A full refund covers the remaining amount. A partial refund needs a unique refundId and the pre-tax amount you returned. For subscriptions, Google wants the ID of the specific renewal being refunded, so refunding a subscription that charged three times means three separate refund calls. The create and refund endpoints share a limit of 1,200 queries per minute.

What Japan alternative payments really save you

The headline saving is smaller than many teams expect, and the refund costs eat into it. Here are Apple's published Japan rates.

On a standard in-app sale, moving to your own processor saves 5 points of the customer's price. Your processor's fee comes out of those 5 points. Google's billing choice rates are tiered by product type and install age. For alternative billing inside the app, its help page lists 10% for auto-renewing subscriptions, and 20% or 25% for other purchases depending on whether the install is new or existing, with 10% on the first $1M of annual earnings for eligible developers.

Costs the store used to absorb

• Refunds you grant: the full price goes back from your processor balance, and whatever the processor charges to refund is yours.
• Chargebacks: your processor's dispute fee, plus the time to assemble evidence for the bank. There's no store review to win first.
• Customer support: the staff or tooling that answers order history, subscription and refund questions in Japanese, which Apple and Google no longer handle for these buyers.
• Reporting: the engineering to send Apple a monthly report and Google a call within 24 hours of every sale and refund.

Costs no refund ever returns

These were never the store's problem, and they stay yours either way. The compute behind what the buyer used, the API calls their requests made, the storage for what they created, and any payout owed to a creator or partner on that sale. On In-App Purchase, a CONSUMPTION_REQUEST at least lets you show Apple that the buyer consumed what they paid for. On your own processor, that argument goes to the bank instead, and only if the buyer files a dispute rather than asking you for a refund.

Rules for younger buyers

Refund risk is highest where a child pays, and Apple's Japan rules are built around that. Apps in the Kids category must put a parental gate before any alternative payment flow and can't offer purchases on a website. Other apps must support parental purchasing controls. Users under 13 can only use in-app alternative processing, behind a parental gate. Users from 13 to 17 can use both options, each behind a parental gate.

A checklist before you switch on alternative payments in Japan

• Write a refund policy in Japanese and link to it before the buyer pays. On Google Play, any non-refundable sale has to be disclosed up front.
• Give buyers a page for order history, subscription management and refund requests, linked from the app.
• Confirm your processor is PCI Level 1 compliant and can run disputes, refunds and subscription changes.
• Log every sale, renewal and refund with the IDs each store needs: lineItemId for Apple, externalTransactionId for Google.
• Report Apple refunds and chargebacks in the monthly report, and send Google refunds per renewal, not per subscription.
• Keep per-account usage records, because on your own processor the bank, not the store, is who you'll be showing them to.
• If you're in Google's Japan external payments program, plan the move to billing choice before March 31, 2027.