[illuminati1911]

Summary

• Raise ApiError with Google's structured status and message for unsuccessful Address Validation responses.
• Fall back to HTTPError for non-JSON or malformed error bodies instead of returning error payloads or leaking JSON decoding errors.
• Preserve successful JSON responses and existing retry behavior; HTTP 429 retry policy is unchanged.
• Replace the URL-only test with error-handling regression coverage, remove obsolete commented-out handling, and add a changelog entry.

The existing extractor returns parsed JSON without checking the HTTP status: https://github.com/googlemaps/google-maps-services-python/blob/d3b71ab1333cff0f900d2db6b39c1356341a5ea2/googlemaps/addressvalidation.py#L25-L44

Structured error parsing follows Google's HTTP/JSON error format: https://google.aip.dev/193#http11json-representation

Verification

• Python 3.10: python -m pytest tests/test_addressvalidation.py — 5 passed.
• Python 3.10: python -m pytest — 109 passed.
• Reproduced the original behavior before the fix and confirmed the correction afterward with locally intercepted requests and live sockets blocked.
• Also exercised the committed fix over real loopback HTTP: structured 400 errors, non-JSON 403 errors, 503 retry followed by a successful result, and terminal 429 handling. No Google Maps requests or real credentials were used.
• nox --download-python never -s docs --force-python 3.10 — passed. Visually inspected generated Sphinx documentation and the rendered changelog in Chromium.
• The prescribed Python 3.7 docs build remains unverified because Python 3.7 is unavailable on this machine. The Python 3.10 build is supplemental.
• Pytest ran directly with the repository's test dependencies to avoid the Nox follow-on Codecov upload.