How to Search Years of Google Play Purchase History
"I know I bought this app. I don't remember when, or exactly what it was called." If that sentence is why you're here: the Play Store gives you no search box for your own orders. Here's how to search anyway.
The native limit: there is no search
The official order history (Play Store → profile → Payments & subscriptions → Budget & history) is a scrollable list, newest first. You can't search it, filter it, or jump to a year. For a charge from last month, fine. For "that tower defense game I bought around 2020", you would be scrolling through years of orders with no way to shortcut.
Option 1: Ctrl+F on a Takeout export
The fastest real search available today:
Select Google Play Store only — full walkthrough here. Usually ready in minutes.
Any text editor works. This file lists your acquisitions with titles and dates.
"stardew", "launcher", "weather" — partial names work, which is exactly what fuzzy memory needs.
This genuinely works, and for a one-off lookup it's enough. The downside is that you're reading raw JSON: no amounts (those are in the sibling Order History file), no filters, no structure. It's a search, not a history.
Option 2: JSON → CSV → spreadsheet
Convert the export to CSV and open it in Excel or Google Sheets. Now you can sort by date, filter by title, sum amounts. More power, more setup: conversion tooling, column cleanup, and you redo it every time you want a fresh export. Reasonable for a one-time deep dive; clunky as a habit.
Option 3: A local searchable archive
The missing product is obvious once you've done option 1 twice: something that reads your Takeout export once, then lets you search your whole history like a normal app — instant results, filters by year/type/price, no JSON in sight. That's what App Purchase Vault is being built to be, with one design rule: everything happens on your phone, so your purchase data is never uploaded anywhere. It's in pre-launch — the mockups and launch price are on the homepage if you want to judge the idea.
Search, don't scroll.
App Purchase Vault is in pre-launch: your whole Play history, searchable in milliseconds, on-device.