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What is the recommended best practice for determining at runtime if an app was installed via the Amazon Android Appstore or Google play? I would like to avoid generating separate APKs for each appstore in which my apps are available.

My preferred approach would be to use PackageManger.getInstallerPackageName.

According to the Android API documentation this is exactly what I'm looking for: Retrieve the package name of the application that installed a package. This identifies which market the package came from.

Unfortunately it appears that apps installed via the Amazon Appstore (including KF) return null which is what one would expect only when the user manually installed the APK.

Can somebody let me know if there is another method to do so.

Mat
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user1980076
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1 Answers1

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Aside from the problem where it returns null, getInstallerPackageName() can be tampered with and be made to return inaccurate information.

I have looked into this for a long time, and the best solution I could come up with was to have a constants file that contained that information:

public class Constants {

    public static final int GOOGLE_PLAY = 0;
    public static final int AMAZON = 1;
    public static final int BUILT_FOR = GOOGLE_PLAY;
}

Simply use AMAZON instead of GOOGLE_PLAY in this file and build the apk once for each app store.

Elsewhere in your code you can check this by using:

if(Constants.BUILT_FOR == Constants.GOOGLE_PLAY) {
    //Google Play build
}

if(Constants.BUILT_FOR == Constants.AMAZON) {
    //Amazon Build
}
Raghav Sood
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  • How could it be tampered with? A similar issue can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12593621 and its mentioned that setInstallerPackageName could cause a security exception. – giannileuani Oct 12 '14 at 05:15
  • that did not really answer the question, the question was about doing this without having 2 apks. – mbonnin Jan 28 '16 at 22:00
  • @mbonnin This can be achieved without duplication by Gradle these days. You'll still need to upload separate apks, however – Raghav Sood Jan 28 '16 at 23:20
  • @RaghavSood not sure what you mean by 'duplication'. Having 2 different apks is a hassle. Apparently amazon is starting to support `getInstallerPackageName` so it might be worth giving it another try: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13289748/can-packagemanager-getinstallerpackagename-tell-me-that-my-app-was-installed-f – mbonnin Jan 29 '16 at 17:34