I have an Android an Android Mobile Application with a good userbase . Lets say the name is "A". I wanted to change the Icon as well as the Name (to say "B"). What are the best practices here? Should I first update the icon followed by another release with name change?
I do not have any push notification framework. Hence if an user suddenly doesnt see the old app and icon (since app autoupdated) he might get confused and keep searching in local search of Android phone and coudnt find.
Just name it B formerly A. Your users can find your app searching for A.
Then a few months later remove the formerly A from to name. So you give people some time to get used to the new name.
Related
I have the flutter local notifications package installed and everything works just fine except for one thing:
When the screen is locked and a local notification appears, on iOS it doesn't show the real name of the App but only the name of the flutter project. And if I unlock the screen, the real name of the App appears.
I already changed the App name like you normally would do it, so going to the android folder/app/src/profile/AndroidManifest.xml and also on iOS Runner/Info.plist and change the name.
I also changed the title inside the NotificationController, but this only effects the name of the local notification when the screen is unlocked.
How can I change it so that not depending on wether the screen is locked or unlocked, only the real App name is shown?
Thank you very much!
Ok I guess I know whats going on. Somehow in debug mode sometimes the "real" name of the app doesn't show up but the project name. When releasing the app, this issue disappears.
So if anyone else has this problem, don't worry about it, just release the App, it will function correctly.
Well when I was facing the same problem I just searched that name in the Project level search using Ctrl+Shift+f. After searching it will show you all the places where the old name of your application still exist then you can change them one by one.
In my case I have found app name about 15-16 places some of them I have changed already and then changed the rest.
I hope this will work for you too.
I have been trying to customize ameixa, an open-source icon pack to add some missing icons.
The source I base myself on with can be found here.
I do not intend to add new icons (yet), only to re-use existing ones for some applications that are not supported yet.
For that purpose, I have been adding entries to src/main/res/xml/appfilter.xml
In order to find the ComponentInfo's name, I have been using openlauncher's "hide apps" feature, which gives me the full package name and activity of apps he can see (for instance, com.myapp.app/com.myapp.app.activity.Activity).
My problem is that some of the apps I use don't mention an activity name, but only the app (for instance, com.myapp.app/). I have tried using both this, as well as some obvious activity names (com.myapp.app/com.myapp.app.(App/acitivity.MainActivity...), but none of those worked.
By trying to compare with some other apps that already are shown without a right-hand definition in the already-existing source code, I don't see an obvious pattern to try.
Do any of you know how I can figure out the exact ComponentInfo name I need to enter to a given app icon ?
I ended up figuring out a solution, maybe not the best but it works.
I have been building locally my own version of openlauncher (any other launcher should do), and checked in the code where the list of app is built.
By putting a breakpoint there and debugging my application, I could access the properties "package name" and "activity name" which are enough as a name for the ComponentInfo definition.
Maybe there is a faster/easier way to achieve that, but that's what ended up working for me.
One option is to download Nova Launcher. Long press on an icon to bring up a menu, and then press "Edit". This will show the icon along with the ComponentInfo below it. You can long press on this to copy the text.
A few days ago, I got an alert in my play console that they added more characters to the app title limit. I have an extremely highly rated and high performing multiplayer game that was ranked in the top charts #31 out of many thousands in a very competitive game category and frequently in the trending top charts as well. Within an hour of changing the title, it was completely gone from the top charts and not even ranked at all. All I did was add the word "Multiplayer" to the end of the game title so it changed from "Game Name" to "Game Name Multiplayer". This game gets multiple thousands of organic downloads per day and only 24 hours after this happened there have been 200 downloads and we are in a panic because this obviously killed the monetization dead in it's tracks literally overnight. This top charts multiplayer game is now dead. Can anybody chime in on this and possibly explain why adding the word multiplayer to the game title caused it to not even rank at all and not come back after 2 full days? That seems like an incredibly harsh punishment and is counter productive to the health of the play store. Has anybody else experienced this?
normally changing the app's name or the package name(application id) is never a good practice: it totally changes the ASO(it's the SEO for the apps) so it can(and normally it does) kill your business.
1° I know it's not the case but remember that if you change your package name(also known as applicationId into the manifest.xml) your app no more exists because you changed the name and the URL that linked to your app, so your entire work has gone forever!
2° as I said your old app's name, even if it's really similiar to your actual name, is different somehow, so play store first MUST check your name is not violating google policies(generally 1-2 days to check your new name is OK) and this revision is obviously negative for your ASO; secondly it has to reposition your new name that is like a new instance, not a similiar thing that exploit your old success.
I'm sorry, I have some apps, I understand.. I would try to contact google support:
from the play store homepage click on the question mark above on the right(next to the gear), click it and it will pop up a window on the bottom: inside that little window there is something like "contact us" and you can choose a chat or even a phone number. Maybe they can help you. Sorry if I don't post the number or the email but it changes depending on your country. Let me know if I can help somehow.
ANOTHER IMPORTANT THING:
have you changed the label attribute inside application tag of the manifest?
<application
android:label="#string/app_name" />
According to the Developers Blog from Google, there are things that you can't change:
Once you publish your application under its manifest package name, this is the unique identity of the application forever more. Switching to a different name results in an entirely new application, one that can’t be installed as an update to the existing application.
The most obvious and visible of these is the “manifest package name,” the unique name you give to your application in its AndroidManifest.xml.
So, if you change it, it becomes a new app, and doing so it's subject to the same marketing etc. problems and battles that all new apps are.
Sorry to hear that happened to you, but whenever you change the name of an application, you are essentially creating a new object. So let's say your old game A was doing well and you wanted to change the name. Well by doing so, you created new game B, even with the same assets, which is linked differently. From my understanding of the app stores, it checks for this link to verify the app is authentic, and from there will retrieve the information that you push to the app. By changing the name, you have inherently broke the information chain, causing the plummet that you saw with your app.
It is unfortunate that this occurred, but nevertheless that's how it works, at least from my understanding. Hopefully this was insightful for you, if you had not previously thought about this.
I am wondering which name will be better for my app. I am thinking about experiment, which will change name of application (in 10% downloaded apps). Later I could check statistics which app was used more often.
Is this possible?
No. The app name is specified in your manifest so it will be static. You could change the name in the titlebar of the app though.
Picking a good name is key.
depending on exactly what you want you have a few options. You can call
this.setTitle("New Title Here");
from an Activity and this will change the title that appears at the top of the screen just beneath the notification bar. If you are trying to change the title that appears in the launcher, or on the home screen under the icon I don't think you can do this programmatically. You'd have to create two seperate versions of your application and use the different values for < application android:label> inside your manifest for each of them. Or maybe you could create another values folder like values-hdpi if the values folder works the same as the layout and drawable folders (which I suspect it does, but I've never tested.) then it would pull the value from the Strings.xml file inside the hdpi folder if the device has high density display, so you could get a different name for those devices. Maybe using this method you could use a language modifier like values-esp and somehow force the app to go into 'spanish mode' for a certain subset of users so that it pulls this alternate value.
If I understand your question correctly, you want to know if it's possible to test different names on the Android Market, correct?
The only way to do this with the Google Market is to have two separate copies of your app, but using different package names for each. The name that appears in the Market is set on the Developer Console, and while it can be changed, you will not see two different entries for your app in the market.
This is because the market uses your package name to identify your app, not the app name that you supply.
So, while it's easy to change the display name of the app while it is running by using setTitle as #Tim and #Robby have said, this only changes the app title while it is running - it does not affect the name used in the Android package manager, and it also does not affect the name displayed in the Market.
As I say above, if you are wanting to test which name is more popular and therefore results in more downloads, you will need to have multiple apps on the market with different package names. You will also then have to consider how to handle upgrades, and if one name turns out to be very popular, I don't think there's any facility to "upgrade" the other users to your new package name since they are different packages and therefore there is no upgrade path. This means you'll either have to inconvenience users of the old name by somehow asking them to switch to the new app name, or maintain all named versions of your app for the expected lifetime of it.
If you do get your users to switch to the new app, you will then also have to consider how to migrate their data. This can be done (3G watchdog does it when you upgrade from the lite version to pro), but it's an extra layer of complexity that you can avoid.
the least thing i like on the nexus one is the useless app it runs when on the desktop dock.
I already wasted a good day searching for the 3 topics below and failed to find anything.
Is there any replacement for it already available?
Is there source code for the original one?
Is there documentation on how to replace them?
Very Likely. Look in Android Market; I'm sure there's a desktop clock replacement app there.
Yes. look at DeskClock.git.
Yes. look at Intent.CATEGORY_DESK_DOCK. If you create an activity with an intent-filter that contains this category it'll show up in the list of available apps (the 'chooser') when the phone is docked.