I currently have a few apps in the Play Store about different ships. Is there a way to upgrade all these apps to one consolidated app?
It is not quite possible to do what you want since all your apps use a different package name. As Henry suggested, you can update all your apps and tell the user to install the new app.
The other (not so recommended) option would be to create your consolidated app and generate a different apk for each app you already have on the Store, modifying only the package name. All the users will be able to have the consolidated app without the need to install a new app. However, it is a bad approach since you will have many copies of the same app in the store, which may lead you into troubles (not so easy to maintain and probably problems with Google).
Related
I know a single app bundle is enough to support different kinds of configurations, but one of our module is in react native and recently we've upgraded the Gradle version to 7.0.0. due to which our build machine won't let us use the minimum SDK below 21. This is why I wanted to create separate .aab files(one created on the build machine the other one from android studio) with different API levels(one will support android 19+ and the other one will support android 21+) and I wanted to upload these bundles without changing package name or application id. Any suggestions around this? or is there any better way to do this?
Note:- Two separate .aab are a must. I already have looked into this solution but it is not helpful to me.
I have been searching a lot for the best practice for my problem and didn't find anything useful so far.
My problem is:
I have platform that create E-commerce apps for the user and than we publish it for the users on the play store.
NOTE: each app have different name and maybe different google account.
Every time there's bug fix or new feature, we need to copy paste the same code in every project and then upload them again to the store.
My question is:
Is there's smarter way to deal with this ? i mean what if we have 100 app of the same project, that will be pain to update the code in all of them and than upload all APK's again.
Maybe there's way to update the classes and content dynamic ? or even some tool that can organize the whole thing or manage uploading the APK's ?
Thanks in advance.
You don't need to copy paste the same code in every project and you don't even need different google account.There is a process called white labelling apps in which you can manage unlimited apk from a single project. Just add all the clients in product flavours in gradle file with different application id. Follow the link attached for detailed procedure of white labelling
https://proandroiddev.com/advanced-android-flavors-part-1-building-white-label-apps-on-android-ade16af23bcf
Is it possible to get the user behavior on the phone (for example Alpesh has an Android phone and he uses multiple apps, browser YouTube etc). Whatever he is doing on the phone I want to get all those things from behind (which apps he has installed, which app he opens and what he search on the phone, All these data I want to get programmatically so what all can be get in android).
For now I am aware that installed apps list can be get easily but I want to get usage history and what he do all on mobile.
This is not a code solution, but an answer to your question, so you can get start some where.
In my opinion your question title are asking about two things.
(part 1) Getting User Behavior on the Android Phone (part 2)(App History, Browse
History etc)
1- First part Getting User Behavior on the Android Phone:
There is a concept called context awareness. Short described; it is about gathering different information from the phone, like light sensor, motion sensor, sound, location or even user behavior etc. and depending on your app requirement and the gathered information:
You could send these information over cloud data store for statically usage
You could make your phone doing (behavior) different things depending on location, motion or what ever.
etc.
For context awareness it is an open area for pervasive computing research. And it is not just few lines of code to write, it is typically a complete solution depending on requirement. Example I have built a context awareness application to gather noise collected by phones from different locations for research purpose inspired from this framework, but I am pretty sure you can find other frameworks or even build your own, as I did in my case.
The mentioned framework has some examples.
2- The second part is about App History, Browse History etc.:
This is possible, but you still need to build a peace of software (App) to collect all these information (logs) from the phone. Hereafter you can make phone act on different conditions and/or again send it over a RESTful API over cloud service data store, there is no limit for it.
The problem is, there is no thing out of the box for your requirement. Even if you find frameworks you still need to research it and further work on it.
You can find different examples for your requirement, like to collect browser history, you can find SO question here:
Get browser history and search result in android
Or get list of installed application:
How to get a list of installed android applications and pick one to run
My point here is you need to solve small goals at a time and put your knowledge together at the end.
Both 1 and 2 can also be related to each other, depending on your achievement.
Conclusion
Make a goal to your project.
Define the main requirements and tasks of your project.
Research your options (Technology, Cost, Target Audience, What data I can or I should not collect, what is possible to collect, what is the limits, Privacy issues etc.).
Split your project in small assets and try to solve small problems/goals.
Finally you would be able to put the puzzles together and build your final application
but i want to get usage history and what he do all on mobile
This is not possible and shouldn't ever be possible. Each app is sandboxed by Android so apps cannot inspect what other apps are doing. Think about it, you wouldn't want apps to be able to intercept private information such as banking details.
Every app is isolated from the other ones. Unless you develop a system signed app, you will not be able to gather all that data.
What you could do is to develop your own Android Rom where you then develop your data collection the exact way you want. Then you need to distribute your rom, which is another story...
I have a development environment where web apps can be hosted. We generally use angular for our web apps so ionic should already be a pretty close match.
What I'm looking for is a way to be able to take a web application in angular and basically "generate" the ionic app out of it. We can assume that the app has been "modified" to correctly import the ionic module(s) and the necessary code.
Other than that, the site must remain functional on a desktop client (but I assume this is not an issue) and we want to "generate" the apk (or whatever target environment is required) based on the original web app.
Ideally the generation should be triggered by basically right clicking in a menu and selecting "Generate APK". This means I'm looking for programmatic access to whatever API cordova/ionic has.
My google-fu is letting me down though because all I can find though is command line references, I would prefer to stay away from commandline-level integration unless absolutely required. Other than that any search for API just brings up the javascript API they expose, not any API they might expose to programmatically generate artifacts like an APK.
UPDATE: I don't mind a downvote (the question is rather hard to phrase correctly) but at least state why so I can improve upon it.
Building a native APK in command line should be possible using the Android Gradle toolchain. You can go thru the process in the IDE and then just replace the files for your created app with the newly generated files and invoke gradle. For other OS's this becomes harder e.g. for iOS using xcodebuild is pretty hairy and if you add into it complexities like hosting Macs in the cloud (required for xcode) and the changes Apple makes all the time...
We implemented pretty much that (and a lot more) for Java at Codename One, we also support including Cordova plugins which might work for you. We also provide white label services for 3rd parties.
Google Play Developer Program Policies says:
An app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update
its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play's
update mechanism.
I want to publish my application to Google Play. And I been planing to load my core SWF file dynamically, so game updates could be done without the need of going to Google Play market. An alternative Java implementation can achieve the same thing by downloading remote jar file.
In both cases I will have the next limitations:
I cannot modify my Manifest file.
I cannot extend the application permissions that I asked
My external code is bounded to application sand box(Just as the rest of my application)
Notice that my external code is not part of the APK files. It will be stored in application folder or in external storage(SD-Card). Its same place where external assets is stored.
Does this violatating Google policy? I am not sure what they meant by "APK binary code".
I am not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV...
Your best course of action is to look at the reason they included that phrase in the first place. That text now exists in the Google Play policy because Facebook did the very same thing that you are describing in their application (providing an auto-update mechanism outside the Play Store) earlier this year, and Google threatened banning the application until this "feature" was removed (which it was, shortly thereafter).
The spirit of the law in this case is that Google does not want applications updating themselves without the user's consent outside of the Play Store...period. If your application does this, you can bet Google won't care how you are doing it and will likely remove the application when and if the feature is discovered. They won't care how closely executable code in an external SWF file resembles the internal classes of the APK.
Legal language like this is is intentionally vague so companies can apply it in any situation they see fit. Don't think you're being safe by splitting hairs with the terminology.
I am not a lawyer. I see this restriction as limiting only the apk binaries. There are many apps that have dynamic behavior changes, for example Google search where the search results algorithm is determined by dynamic code on the server, or facebook which loads new images texts, layouts and more.
I think that as long as you do not do anything bad for users using the swf changes, you should be ok.
The purpose of this clause, as I understand it, is to prevent apps from loading and using code that was not tested by Google using the normal process that tests apps when published. Google want to ensure that all code is scanned/tested by their bots.