This answer looked promising, but I found it confusing.
Does canceling a user subscription through merchant console/API refunds him money?
One person says:
Canceling a subscription will only prevent the recurrences from occurring and enable you to >refund the initial order price.
You can partially refund or fully refund each recurrence if you wish to reduce the fee.
with another user commenting:
Actually, no. Canceling a subscription for user will prevent the recurrences, yes, but this >will also refund user. Apparently, there is no way of canceling a subscription without >refunding. But you can refund without canceling, yes.
But the accepted answer says:
Ok. So, It's not possible to cancel a subscription from merchant console - you can only >cancel\refund individual transaction. Also, if you refund a customer he will receive a >message that his subscription will continue (true) and no refunds will be issued (false). And >you cant even send a custom messages.
So, canceling a subscription is ONLY possible through API call.
It sounds like if you cancel through Merchant console, then a refund is also issued. If you cancel through the Google Developer APIs, then no refund is issued unless you go do it in the Merchant console at the user's request.
Does anyone know if this is correct? We have removed a subscription from the store, and we still need to provide access to it but without renewing subscriptions so when everyone has expired, we can drop support altogether. Thanks for your answers!
I got a helpful response from Google Play regarding the exact effects of canceling an in-app subscription via Google Developer API.
In short:
Does it cancel auto-renew? Yes Does it refund money? No What happens when the cancellation goes through? An email is sent informing the customer that the subscription was canceled.
For more information, they pointed me to the following link (which is helpful):
https://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_subscriptions.html#cancellation