I am a newbie and have just created an Android app to upload into the PlayStore.
I have followed instructions from here.
But I have few questions:
Currently I am using my phone to test the app, but can I assume it will work as seamlessly on other phones of different brands as they may have different UIs?
After I upload the apps, do I know who have installed my app like email ID so that I could send them emails regarding new apps in the future or updates available in PlayStore or I must depend on Google Playstore notifications for this?
1- Regarding app behavior on different hardware, do remember different Android Hardware Companies have optimized and customized android Operating system with respect to their hardware, so naturally it will behave different to some aspect.
2- Now who has installed your app, if it was a paid app, then you can get the email addresses from your merchant account order details.
If it was a free app, then the best you can do is put up notes in your old app description, and on your website if you have one.
3- Regarding update in android app, you can avail this feature programmatically and tutorialz are available over the internet as well. Video Tutorial
You cannot just assume that it will work fine on all phones as phones and tablets come with different screen sizes, density and resolutions and layouts vary accordingly. Least you can do is try testing on differnt emulators if possible (in case you dont have other devices). There are sites where you can pay and get online devices to test.
For your other answer, you cannot directly get the email ids of others as it is against Google Privacy policy. But, you can integrate Google Analytics engine to get most of the infrmation about the user (which phone it is insatlled, which country, when is he using your app, how many people using your app at any time). For email id, you anyway have a gmail id for you app upload. You can request you app user to send you mail with feedbacks and problems. This you can include in the description field
I have also just recently launched my first app, about 2 weeks ago.
Not all phones will scale to the same size, as there are different screen densities and height/width ratios. You can however get the height/width of the device, and scale the sizes of the things in your UI based on that.
This link has a good example of getting the dimensions of the Android device.
In the Eclipse IDE, you can also use the emulator to test out different Android devices that have different screen sizes, amounts of density pixels, have different Android versions, etc.
Google Play Developer only gives very basic statistics, like amounts of people who downloaded it, but not actually who downloaded it. I have heard that putting something like Google Analytics can give you more information, that is more up to date/accurate, but I'm not sure if it actually gives contact info.
Also, I released a few updates for my app, and I'm pretty sure Google Play sends notifications to update the app on the user's device, as most of my users have updated within a couple of days of the new release.
Related
I have a app created in xamarin forms, I already know how to create the APK, the app is to be used internally, i dont want to publish to the appstore, how can the app be update when is available a new version ?
Depending on your resources at hand and requirements, you have a couple of options. These options include, but are certainly not limited to:
Visual Studio Mobile Center (link): probably the most obvious choice. Out of the box support for Xamarin, and 'just works'. You can set up different groups of users, add analytics and crash reporting, etc. In the future you might be able to take your configuration to its big brother: VSTS. But beware! The product is in preview right now. Preview in Microsoft-land means free for now, but doesn't have to be in the future. While I expect it not to cost much/anything for basic functionality, it is something to be aware of. Not sure on this, but I think you need to invite your users by hand, so you have to know who you want to invite.
Google Play Store (link): It's kind of a mis-use, but you could of course leverage the Google Play Stores capabilites for Alpha/Beta testing. Also here you have the ability to create groups and have some basic reporting options. In terms of delivering your app you have some nice options here like A/B testing and unlike Mobile Center (again, I didn't verify this) you can setup a link with which people can enroll themselves. Depending on your needs, this might be nice. In terms of costs, this will set you back 25 dollars once. And you could develop and distribute other apps if you'd like.
Manual: send the APK file manually or hosting it on a shared location. I would prefer this least of all. People are not notified of any updates and you don't have any insights apart from something you might have incorporated in your app. Also you don't have any control over who installs or sees the app, etc.
But of course the prefered way would be to do it through the Google Play enterprise program. See this website. This provides you and your end-users with a private app store basically. Or as they say:
A managed version of Google Play is used by enterprises and their employees to access a rich ecosystem of work and productivity apps.
You can have private apps, only available for your targeted audience and still leverage the power of the Google Play store. The experience for your end-users will be unified with the regular app store.
I couldn't find a straight answer, but it seems the private apps will also cost just 25 dollars once and is included in the regular Play Store developer license.
You have a good way to do that : Use Beta this a service provided by Fabric, you can upload your app with different versions and get access to different teams in your company. It's easy to use and quick to manage.
Hope it helps.
You have multiple options at your hand:
use Bitrise or Visual Studio Mobile Center (aka HockeyApp) to build and provide a downloadable version of you app
in addiont to Bitrise or VS Mobile Center you can set up your own store. Take a look at Relution for example
build locally on your machine and push it to:
a fileshare
an FTP-site
the user by mail.
My question is how to keep common leader board. Whether Google Play Game Services is way to keep it for both iOs and Android?
Yes, as long as the app ID, bundle name, leaderboards keys are same, common leaderboards should work just fine.
There is a problem in that iOS does not default to allow for the publically sharing of activity. This means that even though you may have requested the appropriate scopes in the platform definition for sharing of info, iOS will not publically be doing that.
Also - the leaderboard to be used through Google Play Games must have its Enable tamper protection set to OFF in order for the leaderboard to be shareable outside of the Android world (e.g.; Apple, web). If this property is set to off, the All setting for the leaderboard UI will show all users' high scores, except for the iPhone users which have not permitted their activity to be displayed publically.
Yes and no. It is technically feasible to implement the leaderboard however there is a massive caveat being that a gmail account that has not previously registered a Gamer Id will not be able to sign in. This is not mentioned in the docs. This issue is particularly insidious in that many people, myself included, used the same account for testing on android and ios. As long as you signed in on android first will then be successful on iOS as well. Which is great if your game targets people who use android and iOS simultaneously lol.
I wonder if anyone knows about how Google play maintains the device list?
This is my case:
We are developing a NFC APP which at the beginning it will work with only about 10 handsets, we really want to limit and filter by handset model (not only by the manifest).
We want to do this through the Google Play's device manager list, however I would like to know this list is maintained, in principle we would like to use the TAC value to identify each handset, but I don't think GP use TAC as ID.
I have doing some testing, I can see there e.g several Samsung S4s, do you know why is that? and even if I allow all of them in the Developer console, then when I try to download the APP, I get the error, "your device is not compatible".
Lots of smartphones have different variations, for various countries, network providers etc. If you update the playstore to allow/block a device from installing the app it can take a couple of hours to propogate across there servers.
How the list is maintained I don't know, I would assume that when a device is activated onto Google Play, it likely stores the information within the Play Store device listing. Failing that, the OEM sends the information to Google while they are getting approved for Google Play Services. This is only a guess though, I would guess there is no information actually explaining how this list is maintained as developers do not normally need to know.
okay, its a general question, is it possible to make a web installer ( a single apk file hosted on the play store or app store which on execution, download the code and resources from my own web server, the apk file will just act like a downloader or something like that) for an app on Play Store or in App Store? the main concern is, I don't want some crackers to access and break into the app for the premium version of the app.
have anyone tried or heard of this kinda app distribution? or any app/developers use this method to deliver the app? (guess some games do?)
PS. web installers have some advantages of controlling the older versions and also can reduce the apk file size as I guess the low pixel density resources only need to be delivered to devices with low density displays. ie, the resources(icons and stuff) for a low end device does not need to be delivered to a high or middle or extra high end device and vice versa. plus developer dont need to worry about offline app transfers thus each download can be counted. but a disadvantage of heavy use of server.
thanks, for any views, guidelines or suggestions.
NB- Its not a web app. the Java coded app for android and Objective C coded app for iOs
On iOS, if you're wanting to distribute the entire application from your website without using the App Store it's not possible as a general rule. The two exceptions being:
If you get an Enterprise developer's account from Apple, then you can prepare installation packages that will work from a web site. However, you may only distribute the application to direct employees.
For testing stages you can prepare ad-hoc releases and then work with a company such as TestFlight. If you take this approach you're limited to release to 100 devices per year and each release is only valid for 3 months. You can't remove devices from the list except on the anniversary date of your developer account.
If you're actually wanting to put the installer application in the App Store and then download the actual Application, it's not allowed under any circumstances. The ToS prohibit you from having an application which downloads executable code or script (with the implicit exception of a web application)
i have my own app called Geoperks-rewards for you, the problem is i am not able to find my app from google play store for some handsets and even in tablet pc>Can anyone tell me what actually might be the reason behind this.I cannot specifically say for which models and OS versions, its appearing for random models.
The App compatibility depends on many factors, i.e. screen sizes, OS version, device hardware support, some features added in app, etc... All this information is provided on Android Developer website by Google. You can go through the topic Filters on Google Play and maybe revise the manifest.xml file of your app. You might get some idea why it is not compatible with several devices.