Programatically find out which app store install came from?

Question

Background

In my app, I have a 'rate me' button. It follows the usual path - user clicks in, it starts an intent and opens the app's listing on the Play Store. All well and good. Now I wish to try to distribute my app via different app stores (Amazon for example), so obviously, if the user hits the 'rate me' button I don't want it to take the user to the Google Play Store but to whatever store they got it from.

APK For each store

This is possible, true, but I think it would be a complete nightmare to manage (like creating a new APK for each store every time I issue a new update.

So I'm looking for something like this pseudo code:

if(rate-me button pressed){

    if (from Google Play Store){
        Go to Google Play Store
    }
    else if (from Amazon Store){
        Go to Amazon Store
    }
}

And so on.......

I'm guessing there is a way (that some apps must surely use) but I have no idea how to go about it.

Answer 1

I'm going to assume you're writing in Java as you're writing for Android, but if you're not you can look up methods in your language of choice to get the same sort of result. Since Java has no built in support for conditional compilation, there's some pretty easy things you can do here; sometimes the low-tech solution is the best one.

Deploy a different app compiled from different code for each app store. It can be that simple. Just have a global string (or not, encapsulate it where the appropriate logic is) and simply assign it a value, compile, and deploy. It's that easy.

It can be a string, an enum value or integer. It doesn't really matter -- as long as each value is unique per app store. I'd suggest a quick strongly-typed enum with options like "Amazon", "GooglePlay", "XXXX", "ZZZZ", "YYYY". Write scripts to change this value or pass in compilation flags using 3rd party tools if you want this to be automated.

Automating it up

If you want to take this one step further, parse the option as resource file. Write scripts, one for each deployment. Have a file called "store.dat" and write the value of the store it's being deployed to the file when deployed, if you're under Linux or OSX it could be something as simple as

echo "Google" > resources/store/store.dat
RUN COMPILATION STUFF HERE

Make one script to execute all of these scripts in lock step and you have a robust, automated solution.

Answer 2

try this:

try {
    String packagename = context.getPackageName();
    final PackageManager pm = context.getPackageManager();
    PackageInfo pInfo = pm.getPackageInfo(packageName, PackageManager.GET_PERMISSIONS);
    String installerPackagenName = pm.getInstallerPackageName(packageName);
    if(installerPackagenName.equalsIgnoreCase("com.amazon.venezia")){
        //Go to Amazon Store
    } else if (installerPackagenName.equalsIgnoreCase("com.android.vending")){
        //Go to Google Play Store
    } else {

    }
} catch (PackageManager.NameNotFoundException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}