Hiho,
is there a solution to disable my App for one single user?
There is one Person, who buys my app every few days to use the app for calculations, and than deinstalls the app within the 15 Minuts window.
Over 10 times he did it and with the next update i want to create a method, that checks the user mail from market and if its these person, the App should close instantly.
Thanks for Help
Alex
Are you sure this is the same user (and not just a usage trend of one refund every few days)? A user should only be able to refund an app once. According to the App Refund article in Android Market Support:
You have 15 minutes from the time of download to return an application purchased through Android Market for a full refund. You may only return a given application once; if you subsequently purchase the same app again, you may not return it a second time.
EDIT: If it looks like it's the same user, please contact Android Market Support and let them know. Follow the relevant "Contact Us" link at the bottom, and include all relevant information: App name, user's email address, order ID's, etc. Abusing the refund policy like this shouldn't be possible. If it is, they need to know so that hole can be closed :)
you can get the accounts from accountmanager, as I know to do what you want, checking account is the only way I think. you will need GET_ACCOUNTS permission.
Instead of putting in hate code for this single user, I'd suggest you put in a little more effort and put in a more generic check.
Whenever a user signs up, check if the user has already used your application, and if he/she has not, save the user's account information on a backend. Else notify him saying that he/she has already checked the application out and if he/she has some feedback. Try to make the user 'guilty' here!
Building a backend system is pretty simple with a service like stackmob.com. Though for this, you'll need to acquire the GET_ACCOUNTS permission, and for a service like calculator, asking for this permission might seem fishy. So you need to make that call here!
If you do figure out how to identify your user rather than close right away you should do stuff that delays them for 15 minutes.
Make them fill out some forms first (Just for that user), stuff that takes time. Be really specific in the forms with password requirements like 10 chars including upper, lower number and punctuation, then force them to "Log in" using this password (which they won't remember and will have to start over...), but always make it look like each step is the "Last little bit" they will have to do before they can use the app...
Also use a lot of "Contacting server..." and "Calculating" and "Installing" that take time. If you really need to stretch it out, add a few "Retrying" after the connecting message has been there for a while.
Related
I'm working on an Android app where a user must be 18 years or older to apply.
If there will be people under 18, the app would have negative public view which I do not want to deal with.
Is it somehow possible to be sure that my users are older than 17? Is there any service which could possibly accomplish this?
Ideal fictional solution: in my registration form the user writes his/her id number and I would check if he/she is old enough with fictional service.
One not very good solution which I found. There is an app called Muzmatch. It is dating app for Arabs. When the user register he have to use device camera to take picture of himself and send it to server.
I can do the same in my app and check if the user seems old enough but I think it's stupid idea.
Yes this is possible through the Google Play content rating system.
Check out the link: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/188189?hl=en-GB
Scroll down to the Take your app’s rating questionnaire section and it'll run you through the steps to apply an age rating to your app.
In addition to this, maybe you could create a free in app purchase, that the user will have to buy when first entering the app. They would then need either a password or finger print in order to pay via Google Play.
I have developed an android "Group Chat" app. Me and 20 of my friends are using this app to group chat with each other. When I look at the firebase database, I obviously see 21 users (including myself). However, I can't know whether all of them actually have the app installed on their phones, or some of them have uninstalled it. Is there any way I can differentiate among my uses? Generally speaking, can I "flag" my users as, say, active, inactive, and the like?
What is if you add a timestamp every time a use log in. With this timestamp you can see how long the user not log in and so if he is in active for a long time or not. It's not say if the user have delete the app. It's only a prognosis.
If i understand correctly your question, it can be split in two parts.
First part is whether you want to know if your users are online or offline this could be achieved by an online presence system as described here
The second part is whether or not users have installed or uninstalled your app.
In my opinion easiest way to do this is by using the Firebase Analytics SDK. This way you can check the app_remove stats and whenever a user uninstalls an app, it gets updated in the console under events section.
This will give you how many devices uninstalled the app and some info on country, gender and age of the user but you could couple this with a "last login" timestamp to pinpoint the exact user.
More details along with how to include analytics SDK to your app can be found here
Or you can use the .info/connected to have this functionality in your client code. You can read more info about this here and the sample presence app at the bottom of the page will help you get a grip on how to do it.
One possible solution is to add a flag in the database as the child of the user. This flag will have an initial value of active.
And instead of uninstalling the app directly, you can have a delete account functionality in the app, and whenever someone wants to delete his/her account, it simply updates the flag to inactive in firebase database.
Now you will know actually who is active / inactive.
I think this may not be the right question for this forum, but I could not think of where else to post it.
However, here goes. I am creating a dating app in android. One of the major hurdles I am facing is user authentication and verification.
Put simply, how do I ensure that a user is who he/she really says he is? How do I prevent, or reduce people creating fake profiles on the app? One way to do this would be to force the user to connect with his facebook account, but again, fake facebook profiles can be created.
Is there any other good method to ensure user verification?
The best way I can think of, although not fool proof, would be when the user creates an account it sends them an email where they need to click a link. Clicking the link can ask for some confirmation of something, such as their chosen username and or the first name and last name etc. If they fill in this information from the email, they're probably legit and you can mark the account as active within the database. If after x number of days delete any accounts that have not been verified.
I would like to use in-app billing in my android application (instead of creation 2 versions of application - free and pro). If user paid, then additional options in Preferences should be available.
My application synchronizes data with website (not my).
Each time synchronization happens, I would like to check if user paid or not.
How should I do it?
I think the easiest means for you would be to use Managed purchase. More on it is at http://developer.android.com/guide/market/billing/billing_admin.html#billing-purchase-type
The "manage by user account" purchase
type is useful if you are selling
items such as game levels or
application features. These items are
not transient and usually need to be
restored whenever a user reinstalls
your application, wipes the data on
their device, or installs your
application on a new device.
Update: website and API updated refer this now https://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/api.html
There are to many ways to do that, i will try and give you some of the most used
what about user accounts? can your application support users? if it does, its practically solved with 1 user per 1 account. just add a flag to your DB for each user. this is the most secure way, its very easy to know if someone is stealing from you thats why all MMO's (like WOW) use this type of check. you can easily know if theres more then one user on an account as well
the downside is that it requires more processing and some support is case someone's account gets stolen or other user support of that kind.
you can save a sort of key inside your application. and some other key on the server. if the key matches (either 1 to 1 or after some manipulation) then you have yourself a paid user, other you dont.when someone buys the application then change the key on the device.
just do what you dont want to do and have 2 applications for free and paid it will probably be less work then the other 2 list above.
there are many ways of doing what you want. but i'll tell you this:
most applications use method 2 but on the opposite direction, meaning serial key.
i dont think your gonna create an mmo so theres no need for option 1 unless you really dont want anyone hacking your application (which i assume no matter what you do it will be hacked in todays world. i'll advice you to trust those who pay and accept those who dont)
method 3 is just easy in my opinion especialy when you want to just remove menu options, but it also creates duplicate repositories for code.
good luck. what ever you decide is good, make a theft protection, if someone wants to steal it, they will, dont fight it (even PS3 got hacked in the end)
I've been asked for some review copies of an Android app I've written, which is great, but I'm not willing to give out the full app to just anyone. I want to make a time-limited version (which works for about two weeks, then gives up the ghost).
What is the easiest way to do this? I haven't tested this myself, but I think that in theory if one built the app using a keystore which expires in two weeks might work. Is that correct, or do I have to put a line of code in the app which shuts it down if you attempt to boot it after a set date?
The keystore is not checked after the application is installed; only at installation time is the date verified.
You would have to put in your own time limit code, I imagine. Though if you want to be really paranoid, you could consider that the user could alter their device's clock.
Alternatively, you could do an online check (against time on your server), or make each APK that you hand out have an individual token embedded which gets validated against your server.
I have a simplest suggestion, what if the reviewer buys the application, and you refund the payment?
I just thought of a cool way to do this.
You make a Beta version of your app, and you can define the group of testers, you just need the email address of that person, or a G+ community they can request access to, and then you add them to the Beta program.
easiest way is to hardcode an end date and no longer run after that. it can be circumvented if users change their system time, but that is kind of a hassle to go through.
otherwise, you can have your app check the license periodically by connecting to your server over http, but that requires more work.
This sounds like a great idea. You'd probably want to make the app phone home and verify with a server that a certain amount of time has elapsed. Users can always delete your preferences file on the phone or uninstall and reinstall the app to get around on-phone restrictions.
I believe the keystore approach may also work, but I'm not sure exactly how they work in Android.
Please make this an open source project when you finish - I think this would be useful to a lot of people!
You could use TelephonyManager.getDeviceId() and create a build of your application that would only ever run on the reviewer's phone.
You could either hard code this into the application or have the phone check against your server where you'd store permissions for each Device ID. With the latter case you could have your application display the Device ID when it can't find a license; the reviewer tells you this and then you enter this in your DB.
As per Google: "If you plan to publish your application(s) on Android Market, the key you use to sign the application(s) must have a validity period ending after 22 October 2033. The Market server enforces this requirement to ensure that users can seamlessly upgrade Market applications when new versions are available"
What we did with our developer challenge II entry was when we hit the expiration date any new data we processed was replaced by an expiration warning. So the application functioned with existing data but not with any new data the user entered after the expiration. Since our app processed text messages, setting back the clock was an unrealistic long-term solution for the user to overcome the expiration.
Depending on the type of application your are giving to reviewers, you may have another options.
You code it like a lot of shareware and only let the application run so many times. The code for this would be very easy to implement. Sure the reviewer could delete the data, but not very easily. I don't think they would go through that much trouble for maybe a couple dollars.