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!
We would like to provide a list of reference from a public sheets that everyone can view in android.
I tried the Quickstart sample from Google which works just fine.
But we would like to minimize the steps (steps like allow access to contacts, choosing google account) since this apps is designed for people who's considering suicide. The list is fill of info about where to ask for help.
I did find a article about how to read a sheet as a InputStream
I would really appreciate if there's more elegant way with Google Sheet API V4
If the Sheets are shared to "anyone with link" or "public", it might not be necessary to go through the account flow in Android. Choosing an account is mainly to get access to the right credentials, but public sheets can be read anonymously (without credentials) with the API.
If you are still looking for an answer, only a single line replacement is needed for this to work:
Credential credential = new GoogleCredential().createScoped(SCOPES);
instead of
Credential credential = authorize();
then you can remove the method authorize() and the corresponding variables
I found out there's a setKey method in com.google.api.services.sheets.v4.Sheets. For the third parameter in Builder, as credential, can be null. But will have error "Requests from this Android client application are blocked" if the Key restricted to Android.
I'm searching the PlayServices equivalent of this call:
https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/<some_user_id>?key=<your_api_key>
The call above is documentation of the call above is here: https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/latest/people/get
However this is a web API call and my keys are restricted to a limited set of IPs. I think it would be a bad idea to put that key in code. Do you think the same?
Just as a side note I would like get the data without "authorization". I mean I authenticate with my key, but I don't want to ask the user. With the HTTP call above this is possible, so what is the Android SDK equivalent? I'm not asking how to do the GoogleApiClient stuff I have this already working. I just want to know the right call of the plus API.
If there is nothing similar do you know how to authenticate myself at the rest service with my packagename and signature?
In summary I just want to know the (first and last) name of the local G+ accounts like in the Google Foto app.
To load a specific Google+ profile in Android use the load method for com.google.android.gms.plus.People.
public abstract PendingResult<People.LoadPeopleResult> load (GoogleApiClient googleApiClient, String... personIds)
I would like to integrate Twitter into my Android application so that I can post messages to Twitter.
It really depends on how you want the interaction to work. You can:
Use their API (helped by a library such as twitter4j, as suggested by Heiko Rupp), or
Find a way to integrate with the Twitter app, although there is no published protocol for this as far as I know. This is also not a good idea because many people use other apps such as Twidroyd, TweetDeck and so on, but it would definitely be cool, or
If you don't expect the user to do this very often, you can just open up http://twitter.com/?status=<what-to-tweet> using a simple intent.
Method 3 can be easily described here:
Intent i = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
i.setData(Uri.parse("http://twitter.com/?status=" + Uri.encode(message)));
startActivity(i);
You can also combine 2 and 3. You can try a few known apps (official Twitter, TweetDeck, ...) and if all of them fail (because they're not present or because they have been updated and broke the protocol) you resort to opening up the browser.
Also note that it might be possible for method 3 to actually launch an app instead of the browser (or at least give the user a choice between the two), if the app handles the correct intents.
Another thing worth mentioning is that it's very possible that you will not be able to integrate with any Twitter apps. What I've said here is purely hypothetical, I have no idea whether these apps support such integrations. You should consult each app and see if they expose some intents that you could use. If they don't, you can still hack around a little and you might find them, but that will be unreliable because they will most probably break after a couple of updates.
You could use the twitter4j library to talk to twitter. Since Twitter has changed over to oAuth, the initial authentication is not trivial.
Basically you need to register your app with Twitter (go to your profile and then to the developer page to register your app - you will then get consumer token+secret). Then follow this example to authenticate with Twitter.
You may have a look at Zwitscher (rev 0.65, code of oAuth has not been updated for the nw internal changes after 0.65), which is an open source Twitter client for a larger example.
You may have a look at one of my examples of how to get Sign-in with twitter working on android.
It uses twitter4j, and with slight modification, you can make it post tweets too!
find it here.
UPDATE: there's one question specific to this issue: twitter,update status
I use twitter4j and oauth-signpost to create facebook like oauth authorization (webview dialog). Checkout this post
You can send the appropriate Intent to start the default twitter application
You can do this without Twitter4j, thus avoiding the massive headache of implementing the OAuth flow.
String tweetText = "We be tweetin!";
String url = "twitter://post?message=";
try {
Intent i = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
i.setData(Uri.parse(url + Uri.encode(text)));
startActivity(i);
} catch (android.content.ActivityNotFoundException e) {
Toast.makeText(this, "Can't send tweet!", 2).show();
}
Other supported twitter:// urls are listed here.
If the user has the Twitter App installed on their device it'll open it directly to a share view. When cancelled or shared it'll return direct to your App. Super simple. Similar to how iOS handles sharing now (with Facebook and Twitter integration).
This doesn't handle cases where the user uses another App as their primary Twitter client.
I want to connect my users to signin in facebook through my app. I did some google and some people are saying use fbrocket where as some http://github.com/facebook/facebook-android-sdk.git. I want suggestions
1) which one is easy to implement?
2) what is the difference between them?
3) Why I need to install a jar. Can I achieve this using some Facebook Api?
Any suggestion is much appreciated.
Thanks rachana.
As Cristian said, fbrocket predates the official SDK and is more or less obsoleted by the official SDK, which is newer, shinier, and mostly based on newer longer-support-lived standards like OpenGraph and OAuth. FBRocket is supposedly being rewritten for these, but there's no release for that yet AFAIK. There's a few things the official SDK is still missing (photo uploading, for instance) but if you just want sign-in-via-facebook, it's definitely the way to go.
I'm not sure I understand your 3rd question though -- you need to include Facebook code, either by a jarfile, android library include, or copy-paste -- in order to actually call the Facebook APIs. The Facebook project is open source; if you're not comfortable including it wholesale, you can freely yank out the bits you need. For example, I've used it in projects that only needed authentication and not publishing, customizing the auth dialog handline and removing all the non-login-related code. You could roll your own implementation based on authenticating via OAuth2 and call all the endpoints yourself, but why bother when Facebook already did the work of giving you the code to do that from Android already?
I recommend to use http://github.com/facebook/facebook-android-sdk.git since it's official and it's updated regularly (it's also really easy to implement and it comes with a couple of nice examples). On the other hand FBRocket seems to be out of date, and the developers are still working on the support for Facebook Graph API.
This is facebook's developer info page, the link you gave seems to be the official Android API.
The jar is the actual library that speaks with facebook.
What action on Facebook are you trying to perform? If you are only trying to allow the user to post content from your application to their facebook page you do this
private static final String FACEBOOK_URL = "http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=
try {
Uri uri = Uri.parse(FACEBOOK_URL + yourcontent + "&src=sp");
Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, uri);
startActivity(intent);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
}