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 developing an android application based on One Drive, using the Live SDK. I am stuck on how to get the available and free space for each user.
From REST, you can get quota and available space for the current signed in user with (details here)
GET https://apis.live.net/v5.0/me/skydrive/quota?access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN
which returns JSON
{ "quota": 26843545600,
"available": 26805319016 }
So, for Android, based on this reference you can probably just use something like this for this GET call
client.getAsync("me/skydrive/quota", new LiveOperationListener() {
... });
I am trying to develop a Moodle Android app. I am using MoodleREST source code for my reference.Is there any other documentation on Moodle site which documents moodle core webservice functions with their required params.
I have found list of functions here http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Web_services_Roadmap but could not get proper documentation on how to call these functions with required params from mobile client using REST.
I am new to moodle and still learning it, so my question can be a little naive so please bear with it :)
This could be helpful http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Creating_a_web_service_client
And if you have some administrator access to Moodle, go to
yourmoodle/admin/webservice/documentation.php , or
Administration > Plugins > Web services > API Documentation.
There is API with documentation. (Dont know if there is better way though :/)
D.
AIUI you need admin to access the most comprehensive web service API, as described by #Dolfa. You'll need these docs and/or the source if you're developing against their REST API. The API docs are generated from the source, presumably so they accurately reflect the API in the installed version.
You could:
Browse the code on github
Clone the version you intend to program against so you can browse the code locally
Install it and give yourself admin so you can browse the API docs.
If you don't want to go through the hassle of setting up a local Moodle instance, you may be able to figure out a way to run the php that generates the docs.
Once you have a rough idea of an API call, you can often find out the details by looking at responses to command-line requests e.g.
curl 'https://your.domain/webservice/rest/server.phpmoodlewsrestformat=json' --data 'wsfunction=core_enrol_get_users_courses&wstoken=[your_ws_token]' --compressed | python -m "json.tool"
gives the response
{
"debuginfo": "Missing required key in single structure: userid",
"errorcode": "invalidparameter",
"exception": "invalid_parameter_exception",
"message": "Invalid parameter value detected"
}
indicating that the function requires a userid=[userid] argument.
I'm using phonegap-build / FacebookConnect
Everything works correctly but when I put some post using Android app on the Facebook wall, most of the text remains not shown. There is not even "see more" link at the end of the part of the post. At the half of the second sentence of "description" everything breaks.
The JS function that I'm using for this Android app:
function facebookWallPost() {
console.log('Debug 1');
var params = {
method: 'feed',
name: 'Facebook Dialogs',
link: 'https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/',
picture: 'http://fbrell.com/f8.jpg',
caption: 'Reference Documentation',
description: 'The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support email.'
};
console.log(params);
FB.ui(params, function(obj) { console.log(obj);});
}
The whole script and an example can be seen here ...
Do I need to change data structure and post params as JSON?
Thanks in advance. I appreciate any help...
is there a way of getting access to the details of each one programatically?
There is an open source project called Android Market API which allows you to do the following:
You can browse market with any carrier or locale you want.
Search for apps using keywords or package name.
Retrieve an app info using an app ID.
Retrieve comments using an app ID.
Get PNG screenshots and icon
It is located here: http://code.google.com/p/android-market-api/
Hope this helps you out. =)
As a workaround, you can use appbrain api. It has RSS feeds for lists of apps with description of each one.
Link is in here:
http://www.appbrain.com/info/api
Unfortunately there is still no official API for Google Play Store (previously known as Android Market) to access Android apps' meta-data (or any other stats).
As mentioned in other answers, you could develop your own web crawler, parse the HTML page and extract the app meta-data you need (e.g. title, descriptions, price, etc). This topic has been covered in this other question.
Another option is to use an open-source library based on ProtoBuf to fetch meta-data about an app, here the link to the project: https://code.google.com/archive/p/android-market-api.
This library fetches app meta-data from Google Play on behalf of a valid Google account, but you still need a crawler to "find" which apps are available and schedule their meta-data retrieval. This other open-source project can help you with that: https://code.google.com/archive/p/android-marketplace-crawler.
If you don't want to implement all that by yourself, you could use a third-party service to access Android apps meta-data through a JSON-based API. For instance, 42matters.com (the company I work for) offers an API for both Android and iOS to retrieve apps' meta-data, here more details:
https://42matters.com/app-market-data
In order to get the Title, Icon, Description, Downloads for an app you can use the "lookup" endpoint as documented here:
https://42matters.com/docs/app-market-data/android/apps/lookup
This is an example of the JSON response for the "Angry Birds Space Premium" app:
{
"package_name": "com.rovio.angrybirdsspace.premium",
"title": "Angry Birds Space Premium",
"description": "Play over 300 interstellar levels across 10 planets...",
"short_desc": "The #1 mobile game of all time blasts off into space!",
"rating": 4.3046236038208,
"category": "Arcade",
"cat_key": "GAME_ARCADE",
"cat_keys": [
"GAME_ARCADE",
"GAME",
"FAMILY_EDUCATION",
"FAMILY"
],
"price": "$1.15",
"downloads": "1,000,000 - 5,000,000",
"version": "2.2.1",
"content_rating": "Everyone",
"promo_video": "https://www.youtube.com/embed/g6AL9YqRHaI?ps=play&vq=large&rel=0&autohide=1&showinfo=0&autoplay=1",
"market_update": "2015-07-03T00:00:00+00:00",
"screenshots": [
"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/ZmuBQzIy1G74coPrQ1R7fCeKdJmjTdpJhNrIHBOaFyM0N2EYdUPwZaQjnQUtiUDGmac=h310",
"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Xg2Aq70ZH0SnNhtSKH7xg9jCfisWgmmq3C7xQbx6YMhTVAIRqlRJeH8GYtjxapb_qR4=h310",
"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/T4o5-2_UP82sj4fSSegbjrGmslNHlfvtEYuZacXMSOC55-7eyiKySw05lNF1QQGO2FeU=h310",
"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/f2ennaLdivFu5cQQaVPKsRcWxB8FS5T4Bkoy3l0iPW9-GDDnTVRhvR5kz6l4m8FL1c8=h310",
"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/H-9M03_-O9Df1nHr2-rUdjtk2aeBY3bAxnqSX3m2zh_aV8-K1t0qU1DxLXnK0GrDAw=h310"
],
"created": "2012-03-22T08:24:00+00:00",
"developer": "Rovio Entertainment Ltd.",
"number_ratings": 20812,
"price_currency": "$",
"icon": "https://lh3.ggpht.com/aQaIEGrmba1ENSEgUtArdm3yhJUug7BRWlu_WaspoJusZyHv1rjlWtYqe_qRjE_Kmh1E=w300",
"icon_72": "https://lh3.ggpht.com/aQaIEGrmba1ENSEgUtArdm3yhJUug7BRWlu_WaspoJusZyHv1rjlWtYqe_qRjE_Kmh1E=w72",
"market_url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rovio.angrybirdsspace.premium&referrer=utm_source%3D42matters.com%26utm_medium%3Dapi"
}
Alternatively, we also have a DATA FEED DUMP to access all mobile app data at once: https://42matters.com/docs/app-market-data/file-dump/android-app-details (on this page you can also find a free sample of data for your tests).
I hope this helps, otherwise feel free to get in touch with me. I know this topic quite well and can point you in the right direction.
Regards,
Andrea
You could build a website crawler and crawl the various android app stores and get all the data for the apps.
Not all apps are on the Google Android Market. There are other Android stores like:
Appbrain
Applanet
AndAppStore
AppstoreHQ
etc...
Not all App Stores have APIs so the best way to do it is by crawling their website.