I'm trying to install Kik Messenger twice. I have two accounts and don't like to log out because I lose all of my conversation history. I'm currently using Titanium backup's profile feature, which is a very nice fix, but it's still a pain having to switch back and forth between profiles. I might be looking for "perfect" when perfect doesn't exist. I am completely new to modding apks and Android in general, all of my work on this so far has been "trial and error". Anyways, here's what I have:
I have the Google Play version of Kik installed on my phone. I have extracted that app and modified the package name successfully using apktool. However, when I try to install, I get an error saying something about duplicate provider authority. So I did some research and learned that I'm supposed to edit this part of the AndroidManifest. So I have played around with that a little bit and after I change the authorities, I am able to install the modded app. However, it crashes immediately.
Does anyone know how to fix this problem with the provider/authorities?
The issue you're hitting is that the app has registered certain classes to handle particular events. These need to be unique across all installed apps and point to existing classes in the app that will perform some activity with the supplied information.
You bypassed the safety check when installing by changing the defined handlers in the Manifest but that didn't really fix it as they still need to actually point to a valid, working class that can handle the requests/events.
You would need to decompile, rename the classes involved and all references made to them and recompile the whole app to really fix the problem. However, I'd assume that it would likely be against the license. If the code is open source then it wouldn't be too big a task to rename some classes & packages then build the app. If it's closed source then it is a harder task.
What you can do is either set up your device to use multiple accounts (the OS not the app) as each user has a separate data storage and preference location that should allow you to have two configurations. Or you can request that the developers include some sort of multiple account handling or easy account swap feature.
Related
Is there a way I can get the hierchary view/layout of other running android apps? If that's not possible, could I possibly unpack the app's .apk file and get the information there? For example, there's a setting in developer options that allows you to get the bounds of every elememt on the screen like so
EDIT
I have come to realize that this is not allowed and goes completely against the Android SDK. I apologize for this error and will look more closely in the future.
I have found out that Google blocks any of this because it would require me to inject my own code into other apps, which is not allowed due to malicious behavior in past apps.
I'm trying to compile Python code directly on my Android phone via QPython 3L and it's fine for some initial examples.
Now I want to read the call log and here is my code.
from androidhelper import sl4a
droid = sl4a.Android()
myconst = droid.getConstants("android.provider.CallLog$Calls").result
print(myconst['CONTENT_URI'])
calls=droid.queryContent(myconst['CONTENT_URI'],["number","duration","date","type"]).result
At the last line above it throws a NullPointerException and - after many trials&errors and searches on Google - I'm pretty sure that the root cause is a lack of authorization.
Can you confirm if this is the case (or you spot a bug, contrary to what I believe) and please point me to some documentation, for adding the authorization request, if that is appropriate to my specific code context?
Sometimes to solve programming issues like this, one needs luck, a lot of fantasy and an extreme willpower.
The solution (once one really knows what to do and where to search) can be found on this github page.
The FAQ reads:
A: Why are there so many branches? Q: Because Google Play and some
appstores have strict requirements for application permissions, they
require different permissions, we use different branch codes, for
example, 3 means it is QPython3, L means LIMITED, S means SENSITIVE
permission is required.
After a special (one-off) installation via download on Android, you have to manually add the Telephone permission to the application, using Android permission management. The downloaded app will replace the one installed via Google Play and you'll find your script already there, ready to be run, hopefully without the NPE.
I am hoping to implement some security for an Android app to prevent people from using the code unless it was installed on the correct device by the company. My first choice would be to make sure the app was installed through the Google Play Store, but this app will not be available there.
I have determined that one security measure that will work for my use case is checking some of the information in the Build class. I am concerned that there could be the possibility that some of the fields in the class may not stay the same, even if the same model of device is always used.
What portions of the Build class are subject to change for a specific model of device and what fields should never change?
In the end all of these system configs are just .xml files residing on the device somewhere around /data/system/sysconfig which you can modify in any way you want if you have write access (aka root) so I would recommend starting from making sure that the user running your app does not have root privileges. There are some FOSS libraries for it, you can start from there.
I'm tired to see a lot of Stackoverflow questions about this, even in Google forums or Google official support site, publishing "solutions" that lead to uninstall package through ADB, to do something with the phone rooted, to delete cache of Google Play Services, etc ...
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=64514
https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/3300875?hl=en
http://gizmostorm.com/how-to-fix-package-file-is-invalid-error-on-google-play-store/
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&q=android%20upgrade%20download%20invalid%20package ...
etc ...
Is there any solution from the package side ?
I mean, I have an app with hundreds of thousands of installs, and unfortunately many users are complaining about this error when upgrading from store my new version.
Obviously, I can not go one by one telling they have to do this or that, because they are not developers, they just want to upgrade and run an app !
Some users are telling me (complaining) this happened since the last "upgrade attempt" of my app, and they are not experiencing this "package file is invalid" with any other app in their phones.
So, I guess it's something I can fix with another upgrade.
Is there ANY SOLUTION that I can do in the next APK compilation, uploading to Google Play Store and fix this without "bothering" my users ?
Thank you in advance
I have also faced same issue in my project as well. I was adding many more features with new jar, git open source library code for Nice UI.
For searching for solution I found play store has issue in one of its updates
http://www.androidcentral.com/google-investigating-package-file-invalid-errors-google-play
But this is totally not relevant to my problem
Again searching I found this
http://birbit.com/how-to-solve-linearalloc-problem/
So the solution looks to be loading a few jar files dynamically using DexClassLoader.
http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2011/07/custom-class-loading-in-dalvik.html
Prepare Interface of the jar file (list of all classes and methods) and have the interface in the app - Need to see how to do this. - We can just have those classes which we need in our app and ignore the rest of the classes. This way we can implement for few existing jars and any new jars that we have to add to make sure we don’t run into this issue again.
Keep the jar in assets folder
Load every class from the jar (based on the list of jars we have in the interface). (The classes will be loaded just once on first launch)
But Based on this, this looks to be involving lot of coding changes and a time consuming things.
Moreover I found that facebook also faced same issue in their initial android app
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-dalvik-patch-for-facebook-for-android/10151345597798920
Final Approach I took was removing additional code from jar/git library project which is not require for my application. after that my app got install on 2.3.X with no error.
So, I have found a bug in a specific sdk that causes it to fail on some Android phones after re-installing a new version of an app which uses the sdk (via adb install -r, and presumably when a user gets an update that has been pushed to the Android market). Is there any way to force an application's data to automatically be cleared upon update of the app? I realize there are different ways that data could be stored, but I just need to essentially simulate an invocation of the "Clear Data" button that'd you find when browsing to the application in the "Manage Applications" section of the Settings (i.e. I just want all data gone).
I am an Android noob and am doing minimal Java coding on this project, so I am basically looking for the simplest solution here. I suppose I could settle on storing a "currentVersion" to disk and then checking it upon launch every time to see if the real current version matches the version that was written to disk on the last launch. Is that the only real way to do this? If so, what's the simplest way to do so?
Thanks!
Is there any way to force an application's data to automatically be cleared upon update of the app?
No, at least for my definition of "automatic".
I suppose I could settle on storing a "currentVersion" to disk and then checking it upon launch every time to see if the real current version matches the version that was written to disk on the last launch. Is that the only real way to do this?
I'd name it lastKnownVersion, but otherwise this approach seems sound and probably is your only viable option.
If so, what's the simplest way to do so?
Ummm...do exactly what you said. Use Java I/O (storing the file somewhere inside of getFilesDir()), or SharedPreferences.
Bear in mind, though, that your users may get rather frustrated if you blow away their data on an app update. Personally, I'd rather we find a better solution to your original problem ("I have found a bug in a specific sdk that causes it to fail on some Android phones after re-installing a new version of an app which uses the sdk").