I was bitten by the game crash bug as well. The game won't load, the vault file has 0 bytes data, and the only way to recover is reinstall the game or reinstall a saved game file if you were lucky enough to have known in advance that your game data was likely to be corrupted.

However, reinstalling the game won't give back items purchased at the Store (lunchboxes and Mr. Handy). In a situation like this, when a game crash clearly caused by the software itself results in a loss of items that were purchased with money, (ie: the product is not performing as expected or promised to the customer) it is the responsibility of the company to refund the money.

Writing to customer support on this issue was useless. Both times that I wrote to Bethesda Customer support, I received an auto-generated reply that basically says, post the bug here and contact Google or iTunes if you need anymore help.

I contacted Google Play, and they said that a game crash that results in a loss of purchased items should be refunded by the DEVELOPER and not by Google Play. But I can find no obvious way to request a refund. Can anyone point me in the right direction for where one can request a refund on Store purchases that were lost to this bug?