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I have an android app on Google Play and also an website where.

For the moment, I am using javascript to detect if the device connected to the website is an android device. If is, I am displaying a popup dialog on the device inviting the user to download the app from the PlayStore. If the user clicks ok, he will be redirected to the PlayStore page of my app, I f he clicks no, he will continue using the browser.

Now, the problem is that when the user have installed the app and tryes to access the webpage again, he will be asked again to download the app, even if he allready installed it (which is not a good idea).

Do you know a solution on how to check if the user has allready the app installed on his mobile device?

It is also possible to do android detection with php, so if you have a method with php to detect if the app is installed, I can also use it.

Thank you very much.

Milos Cuculovic
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2 Answers2

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I don't think this is possible for security reasons. I would not want some random website I visit to be able to access my phone Package Manager and find out what apps I have installed.

This would raise a lot of privacy and security concerns.

But I saw one answer that might have a different way of achieving your intent that might be useful to you:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/12901352/1369222

Community
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Anup Cowkur
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  • Thank you @Anup, Te answer to my question seeés logical, but the different way you proposed is not interesting in my case because if the user tryes to access the website with his browser, he will be automaticaly redirected to google play, which is not my goal. – Milos Cuculovic Dec 03 '12 at 08:49
  • Oh okay. Well I guess you can't do this then. Let me know if you figure out some other way though. – Anup Cowkur Dec 03 '12 at 08:51
  • Yes, of corse, If I find the way, I will let you know. Thank you. – Milos Cuculovic Dec 03 '12 at 09:27
  • the SylvainL response seems to be apropriate. If using cookies, we could know on the website that the user tryed to access this page so we don't need to check again if he will download the app. It is not a perfect solution but can work in more than 80% of cases. – Milos Cuculovic Dec 03 '12 at 09:35
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Even if the user doesn't install your application, your web site shouldn't ask more than one or two times to download your application from the PlayStore. The usual way of doing this is to use the browser's cookies in order to remember if it's a new visitor or not. It's not full proof because the cookies functionality could have been deactivated but at least, you won't have to worry about this problem for most of your visitors.

SylvainL
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  • thank you very much, this is a nice idea. Do you have an example of how to use this? One think is comming on my mind, a cookie will expire in a couple of minutes, hours... How to do this in this case? Thank you. – Milos Cuculovic Dec 03 '12 at 09:26