I recently came across this app Purchase Apps, which is somehow able to retrieve apps I've paid for in google play after I signed in using my google account.
I'm trying to find out how it is being done as I want to build a similar app, but for the free apps which were downloaded.
However, I can't find which OAuth API Scope was used for retrieving that information, even after going through the entire list of APIs.
EDIT:
I'm putting a new bounty on this question, as suggested by a similar question I've asked about here, and because here and there I don't see a real answer about how to do it, and what can be done with it.
I'd like to refine the questions into multiple pieces:
What is the API that can be used to get information of purchased apps? Where can I read about it? Please show a full, working example of how to do it.
Can it do more ? Maybe perform search? Maybe show free apps that were installed? Maybe the time they were installed and uninstalled? And the categories of those apps?
Are there any special requirements for using this API ?
EDIT: I'm putting a max bounty on this, because no matter how much I've read and tried, I still failed to make a POC that can query the apps from the Play Store that the user has ever downloaded (name, package name, date installed and/or removed, icon URL, price...), including both paid and free apps.
If anyone finds a working sample, show how it's done, and also show how you've found about it (documentation or anything that has led you to the solution). I can't find it anywhere, and the current solutions here are too vague for me to start from.
Issue is resolved. The exploit has been closed.
We will be closing this bug due to being logged in a Preview version of Android. If the issue is still relevant and reproducible in the latest public release (Android Q), please capture a bugreport and log the bug in https://source.android.com/setup/contribute/report-bugs. If a reply is not received within the next 14 days, this issue will be closed. Thank you for your understanding.
Latest update:
This is a bug and Google will address it in the next update.
We've deferred this issue for consideration in a future release. Thank
you for your time to make Android better
This answer has turned into a conglomeration of ideas and been edited to include information from discussion in the comments.
The androidmarket api, would be a customised api written by the developer. It's not available to the public.
To address your concerns in the comments. The developer would have utilised the current apis available through Android Developer and Google to create a project that manages all of these.
As for accessing Full Account Access, I'm not sure exactly how these developers have achieved this.
I'd recommend using the AccountManager, which is part of android.accounts, has access to credentials and a method getUserData. The account manager has access to passwords and is capable of creating and deleting accounts. This, possibly used with Content Provider
See Udinic/SyncAdapter Authentication.
To reply to your comment:
This blog should help you to get started. Write your own Android Authenticator.
How these apps actually work, I cannot tell you. They may also have different implementations (unless they're a collaborative effort behind the scenes, they most certainly will be different).
One guess. Firstly use GoogleSignInAccount with com.google.android.gms.auth.api.signin.
There a definition for scope, to determine the extent of the permissions the app is granted.
Using requestScopes(), the
public static final String PROFILE
.../ It lets your web app access over-the-air Android app installs.
For example:
GoogleSignInOptions gso =
new GoogleSignInOptions.Builder(GoogleSignInOptions.DEFAULT_SIGN_IN)
.requestEmail().
.requestScopes(new Scope("https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts.readonly"))
.build();
If full access can be gained a list of all apps used by the account holder can be found and compared to what's on the device.
Package Manager will retrieve a list of all apps currently installed on the device.
PackageInfo provides the details about the app.
INSTALL_REASON_USER will also filter out apps that have been actively installed by the user.
You might want to look at com.google.firebase.appindexing and Log User Actions. Different actions can be tracked.
The users account history is found at https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity.
A helpful link is the OAuth 2.0 Playground.
This github repo node-google-play, using node, is current and will call Google Play APIs. As did the archive that was used as an "unofficial" api, android-market-api, to query the market place.
App 1
The app claims to use the following permissions:
Version 2.1.8 can access:
$ In-app purchases
Other
receive data from Internet
view network connections
full network access
use accounts on the device
prevent device from sleeping
read Google service configuration
Noteworthy, the app doesn't set any permissions when there was a basic, install. I was unable to use any of the features, as I have no paid apps. So for the initial search - there were no permissions needed, which would indicate the app didn't have access to my account.
I checked the permissions - there were none set. So the only thing required was to accept the pop up, as displayed in your question.
App 2
The other app you refer to that does the same thing is more upfront about what is being accessed.
My Paid Apps
SECURITY/PRIVACY NOTICE
The first time you run this app, it will ask for full permission to your Google account. This is unfortunately
the only way to access the required information. No personal
information is stored, no information about your apps is shared with
the developer of this app, nor shared with any third parties.
Everything is kept on your phone only.
I've gone into detail over these apps in this blog post, which was for a university capstone project (no monetary gain). I'm inclined to think this is an exploit in the API and not status by design by Google, as there are no API calls to fetch purchases of apps other than the developer's own app. I hypothesize it's a zero day exploit, in which case there's no legitimate way to access this information.
In case of one of these applications (My Paid Apps), after checking the network traffic it is pretty obvious that it does use the Store's Account page to retrieve the list of paid applications.
Now, the mechanism it uses is the same mechanism that Google Chrome currently, and Pokemon GO supposedly at a point in time used.
In a nutshell, steps to do so are as follow:
Login:
What the mentioned program do for the first step is to log the user in and get access to the user's access token. To do so, it uses the android.accounts.AccountManager.getAuthToken() method. (See more: AccountManager)
However, as for the token scope, oauth2:https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthLogin is requested.
It might be important to note that based on the OAth2 documentation from Google, this scope is not valid; however, it seems like a valid scope for Google OAuth v1.
Converting the newly retrieved access token to a ubertoken:
Now, what actually ubertoken supposed to do, is unknown and there is no official documentation about it. However, it was seen in the wild to be used by chrome browser to login users.
This is done by requesting the https://accounts.google.com/OAuthLogin?source=ChromiumBrowser&issueuberauth=1 page.
Converting ubertoken to website session:
Later on, using the newly created ubertoken it is possible to get a website session using the https://accounts.google.com/MergeSession API endpoint. After this step, the application is essentially capable of loading all personal pages that you can open using your browser while logged in; except some special pages including Payment settings.
Retrieving the list of paid applications:
Requesting and parsing the https://play.google.com/store/account page.
Following is the application's traffic as captured by 'Packet Capture':
As it is clearly visible in the picture, the end result is identical to what I get when I normally open the store's account page on my PC with Chrome Desktop:
Side note:
It seems none of these endpoints are documented as they are primarily used by Google's own programs and should be considered internal. Therefore I strongly recommend not using them in any program or code that you expect to run for a long time or in a production environment.
Also, there is bad news here for you too, it seems that the Google Play's account page only lists paid applications or special free apps (more especially OEM apps). I will try to find some time and dig deeper into the other application.
Interesting articles:
Pokemon tokens
Exploiting Google Chrome's OAuth2 Tokens
If you have root access, You can access /data/data/com.android.vending/databases/library.db
OnePlus3T:/data/data/com.android.vending/databases
-rw-rw---- 1 u0_a2 u0_a2 229376 2018-12-26 18:01 library.db
This database has all information, which app you have downloaded, which apps you have purchased, and even in which app you have done IAP.
Check ownership table, It has all information.
ownership (account STRING, library_id STRING, backend INTEGER, doc_id STRING, doc_type INTEGER, offer_type INTEGER, document_hash INTEGER, subs_valid_until_time INTEGER, app_certificate_hash STRING, app_refund_pre_delivery_endtime_ms INTEGER, app_refund_post_delivery_window_ms INTEGER, subs_auto_renewing INTEGER, subs_initiation_time INTEGER, subs_trial_until_time INTEGER, inapp_purchase_data STRING, inapp_signature STRING, preordered INTEGER, owned_via_license INTEGER, shared_by_me INTEGER, sharer_gaia_id TEXT, shareability INTEGER, purchase_time INTEGER, PRIMARY KEY (account, library_id, backend, doc_id, doc_type, offer_type))
Dealing with unofficial Google APIs is incredibly complicated territory. It's going to be possible to get this to work, but that's all I'll say. Proceed at your own risk.
The first thing you're going to need to do is get a Google Play auth token. This can be done several ways, but here's how they do it in Purchased Apps:
public static String getAuthToken(Activity activity, String userEmail) {
AccountManager accountManager = AccountManager.get(activity);
Account userAccount = new Account(userEmail, "com.google");
Bundle options = new Bundle();
options.putBoolean("suppressProgressScreen", true);
String token;
try {
Bundle result = accountManager
.getAuthToken(userAccount, "androidmarket", options, activity, null, null)
.getResult();
token = result.getString("authtoken");
} catch (OperationCanceledException e) {
Log.d(TAG, "Login canceled by user");
return null;
} catch (IOException | AuthenticatorException e) {
Log.e(TAG, "Login failed", e);
return null;
}
return token;
}
A few things to note here:
The above code must be run asynchronously. I recommend RxJava, but an AsyncTask will work.
You must supply a email for the account you want to use. I'll leave the details up to you but this is fairly easy using AccountManager.
After you have an auth token, you can now access any Google Play Store endpoint. The main one used by Purchased Apps is https://android.clients.google.com/fdfe/purchaseHistory. Another one you might be interested in is https://android.clients.google.com/fdfe/details?doc=(package name) (from APKfetch code). Here's a page with some more and some analysis. If you make a request to these APIs, you'll need to supply several headers:
Authorization - "GoogleLogin auth=(your auth token)"
User-Agent - "Android-Finsky/6.4.12.C-all%20%5B0%5D%202744941 (api=3,versionCode=80641200,sdk=" + VERSION.SDK_INT + ",isWideScreen=0)";
X-DFE-Device-Id - your device's Google Services Framework ID, obtained from AdvertisingIdClient.
X-DFE-Client-Id - "am-android-google"
Accept-Language - The device's language code, eg "en".
Now, you need to parse the response. Here's where things get tricky. These APIs returns a message encoded as a Protobuf, so it's essentially just binary data unless you have a schema (which of course, only Google has). One way to go about this in theory is to decompile the Google Play Store app and reuse their generated protobuf models with a tool like JADX.
Unfortunately, I've tried this and it doesn't really work. Protobuf model classes are just too complex for a standard decompiler. What you can use is a tool called PBTK. You'll ideally want to run this on the Google Play Store 6.1.12 APK, since that's the last version before they started using ProGuard. Do note that this program has two errors in its script that need to be fixed before running it: changing 'extracto' to 'extractor' in gui.py and removing the assertion statement on line 500 of jar_extract.py.
Now, that should output all of the response classes as .proto files. Create a folder under src/main called proto and drag the entire generated 'com' directory to it. You can delete everything that's not under com/google/android/finsky/protos. Follow instructions online to setup Gradle with the Protobuf Lite plugin.
When you want to parse a response, you can use the ResponseWrapper class, since they all appear to be contained under that.
That's about as far as I can take you. There's a good chance I got some part of this wrong; JADX is your best friend here, because the best way to figure out what an app is doing is by looking at its code. Hope this helps and happy developing!
you can get the package name of all installed apps on device and then get the information of every installed package that you find in the device from google play without any need to get to user account. there is some third party or unofficial apis to get google play apps details as json by getting the app package name. for example: https://42matters.com/
then use the received information for every package to find free ones.
i have two resources for you to consider, but first, in a word, no. there is no api from GOOGLE to let you do what you want, as these metrics arent stored in the phone, they are on the google play store servors, and google has no OFFICIAL api for the play store. you can however glean some info from these two sites:
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-API-for-the-Google-Play-Storeenter link description here
https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/162146/how-to-see-all-the-apps-i-have-downloaded-from-google-play-store
and this is enough to see how to accomplish this.
first, a list of what apps have been downloaded by an account is only referencable by the account. and this can be done through the play store. since your app will be installed on that users phone, this dosnt matter... you're in.
second, you will need a 3rd party API built for the GOOGLE PLAY STORE, there are some out there, check the first link.
using the api of your choice, you will send a get request, to the play store, and in return you should receive in most cases a json object to deserialize.
deserialize the object, and you will have your list. which list you get will depend on the endpoint you use, but that should be explained by/in the API itself.
good luck!
I am trying to understand what some of the uses cases are for dynamic permissions in Android. In other words, I am trying to understand why we have addPermission*() API methods and why just having static permissions is not sufficient. There doesn't seem to be much material out there explaining this, so I would appreciate some explanation.
Also, in order to understand what apps do with dynamic permissions, I downloaded some Android apps and started to reverse engineer them and look for the addPermission*() API methods in the source code. I've noticed that there are some apps that implement a wrapper class for PackageManager and I was wondering what the purpose is for doing this. Here is an example to the wrapper classes implemented by these apps, all they do is call the respective method of the PackageManager class:
public class PackageManagerWrapper
extends PackageManager
{
protected PackageManager mInner;
public PackageManagerWrapper()
{
this.mInner = null;
}
public PackageManagerWrapper(Context paramContext)
{
this.mInner = paramContext.getPackageManager();
}
#Inject
public PackageManagerWrapper(PackageManager paramPackageManager)
{
this.mInner = paramPackageManager;
}
public void addPackageToPreferred(String paramString)
{
this.mInner.addPackageToPreferred(paramString);
}
public boolean addPermission(PermissionInfo paramPermissionInfo)
{
return this.mInner.addPermission(paramPermissionInfo);
}
...
}
Thanks a lot!
Apps can define custom permissions in order to protect it's code / data but still let other apps (with the right permission) to use it. While it's easy to think of use cases - like a suite of apps need to share a data/functionality only between them, those can be achieved by using a <permission> tag in manifest. However, this API used only for creating permissions not yet used by any other app:
New permissions must be added before any .apks are installed that use those permissions. Permissions you add through this method are remembered across reboots of the device. If the given permission already exists, the info you supply here will be used to update it.
But still meant to be used by any app that had declared a permission-tree in it's manifest.
So, since it's creating permissions at runtime and therefore cannot be applied to own Activities/Services, we are left only with broadcasts. The only advantage of this API over declaring those permissions in Manifest I can think of is that the user don't need to update the application. So if you are having a suit of apps, with one 'main' app (similar to Google Play), and you want to be able to broadcast to new apps in this suit securely even if the user had not updated your app, you can still get updates over the net and add needed permissions to communicate with the new apps.
For your second question - it's cannot be deducted from you example. There might be several reasons, such as acting as Bridge, or in order to add custom functionality.
I am trying to create new User using UserManager service on android KK 4.4 ( Multi-user)
mUserManager = (UserManager)getSystemService(Context.USER_SERVICE);
mUserManager.createUser("USER NAME", 0);
I can access all other APIs in UserManager using mUserManager without giving any error but createUser is showing error "The method createUser(String, int) is undefined for the type UserManager".
I can see createUser is defined in UserManager class.
Can somebody please help me on this in case there's anything I am missing.
If you refer to the documentation for UserManager, you'll see that no createUser method is listed. Even though the method is defined in the Android source code, and exists in the framework installed on the device, it's not part of the public API, so it's not present in the Android SDK; that is, it isn't in the android.jar that you link your app against.
It may still be possible to access it using reflection, but I rather suspect that the service backing this call will disallow non-system apps from calling it, in which case you'll get a SecurityException at runtime.
I'm in a situation where I need to request access tokens for two scopes (from my android application), https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email and https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.userinfo
I would like to get both permissions on a single call to getAuthToken, but can't figure out the string to pass in the authTokenType parameter. I tried several reasonable combinations with no positive results :(
Has anyone solved this issue? Is it possible?
I was having the same issue. Shah is almost right, but his scope string is wrong. It should be
"oauth2:<scope_url> <scope_url>"
not
"oauth2:<scope_url> oauth2:<scope_url>"
If you need multiple OAuth 2.0 scopes, use a space-separated list.
oauth2:https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.userinfo
You asked for sample code, so have a look at the Google Docs Upload Sample application, and in this application have look at the authentication flow done in this sample Android screen (ignore that it's about Google Docs, it still authorizes first). You can get the whole application and run it in an emulator with Google APIs present or run it on your phone. The authorization workflow starts with the buttonAuthorize click, Authorize() and you are specifically interested in this method:
private void gotAccount(Account account)
{
Bundle options = new Bundle();
accountManager.getAuthToken(
account, // Account retrieved using getAccountsByType()
"oauth2:https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email oauth2:https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.userinfo", // Auth scope
//"writely", // Auth scope, doesn't work :(
options, // Authenticator-specific options
this, // Your activity
new OnTokenAcquired(), // Callback called when a token is successfully acquired
null); // Callback called if an error occurs
}
The user gets this access request screen:
Note that this is using the 'local' OAuth2 mechanism, not opening a web browser, but using the authentication provided when you first activated the Android phone.
Also note that the user sees the full URL of the scope instead of a friendly name, I haven't found a way around this and if you do find out it would be great if you could share the answer.
I'm trying to create a SyncAdapter for my Android app to show YouTube videos from one specific channel. The videos are public domain so I don't want the user to login, create an account, authenticate themselves, upload data, or use the contacts database. I simply want the SyncAdapter to periodically update my app's database with the newest video metadata from that channel. I already built a ContentProvider to access my database. I do like the fact that the SyncProvider will handle the ability to turn off syncing, scheduling, and retry backoff mechanisms for updating.
I asked earlier if a SyncAdapter was a good choice for my use case, and I was told it was. I watched the Google I/O video, read the docs, read blogs... (see list below). I've been unable to get anything to work. The best I've gotten was to have the SyncAdapter account show up in the global "Accounts & sync settings" but be non-functional. Even if this worked, it would be less than ideal because I prefer the user to not see the account except from inside my app. This would be acceptable if there was no other option, so long as they don't need to access it to set it up as everything would default to automatic once a day syncing.
I even tried to use the SampleSyncAdapter as-is and put breakpoints in the Authentication code sections. Not a single breakpoint is hit so I can't see what triggers the calls or what data is contained. I would have thought I'd at least get that much.
I'm starting to think using a SyncAdapter is a bad idea despite the recommendation. I've yet to find an example that is close to what I want, let alone a tutorial or complete, organized and clear docs. This seems like it should be a common task many apps would want to do.
Please add to this post any good documentation on this use case. I can find none.
Without this, I think it's fair to recommend to everyone to not use SyncAdapters for this use case. I'm not speaking for other use cases here so don't jump on with how it worked for your use case if it's not like mine.
It would also be helpful to know what version of the API level is considered ready for primetime. There's a number of issues posted regarding version numbers. I'm trying to stay as low as possible to get the most users. My current API target is 7.
Here's list of links I've tried to no avail, others may find these more helpful:
http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/SampleSyncAdapter/index.html
http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/developing-RESTful-android-apps.html
http://naked-code.blogspot.com/2011/05/revenge-of-syncadapter-synchronizing.html
http://www.c99.org/2010/01/23/writing-an-android-sync-provider-part-1/
http://www.c99.org/2010/01/23/writing-an-android-sync-provider-part-2/
http://www.finalconcept.com.au/article/view/android-account-manager-step-by-step
http://www.finalconcept.com.au/article/view/android-account-manager-step-by-step-1
http://www.finalconcept.com.au/article/view/android-account-manager-step-by-step-2
Android SyncAdapter without Authentication vs. Android Service
Why does ContentResolver.requestSync not trigger a sync?
In short the answer is: ContentProvider, AccountManager and SyncAdapter go together. You must have these three pieces, even if they are "dumb".
As stated above, "ContentProvider, AccountManager and SyncAdapter go together".
For your application you can call the following activity the first time your app is loaded to authenticate and start synching automatically:
public class LoginActivity extends AccountAuthenticatorActivity {
private final static String DUMMY_ACCOUNT_NAME = "some_name";
private final static String DUMMY_ACCOUNT_PASS = "some_pass";
private final static String AUTHORITY = "com.android.contacts"; // for example
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
#Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
Account account = new Account(DUMMY_ACCOUNT_NAME, Constants.ACCOUNT_TYPE);
AccountManager am = AccountManager.get(this);
if (am.addAccountExplicitly(account, DUMMY_ACCOUNT_PASS, null)) {
Bundle result = new Bundle();
result.putString(AccountManager.KEY_ACCOUNT_NAME, account.name);
result.putString(AccountManager.KEY_ACCOUNT_TYPE, account.type);
setAccountAuthenticatorResult(result);
ContentResolver.setSyncAutomatically(account, AUTHORITY, true);
}
finish();
}
}
This works in Android API 5+.