How to get Android developer identity information from within Android app code?

Question

I am trying to write a piece of code to get the Android developer identity information (e.g. developer id, public key, etc.)

Does anyone know how can I do this? Presumably, the package information of all apps are held in Package Manager. Is there any API calls available to contact PM and get developer related information?

To understand more about Android signing process, how/when does Android system verify the identity of app developer by verifying the certificate signed by developer? Where is the public key to the certificate held on Android framework? Is there other developer identity related information stored along with the public key? For instance, any developer identity related information in an app's manifest file?

Thanks a lot for any inputs.

This would be the in signing files contained in the apk itself, you'd have to check the package manager docs to see if it is exported through that. Note that Android certificates are self-signed. There is no verifcation that a developer is who they say they are, only that two things which *claim* to be signed by the same certificate (existing app and an upgrade, some app trying to get special permissions and the system itself, or two apps trying to do a shared user id) actually are. — Chris Stratton, Feb 27 '14 at 17:18
Try to get information from my answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11361452/getting-certificate-details-from-an-apk/11384475#11384475 — Yury, Mar 05 '14 at 08:41

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 08 '21 at 23:57

AFAIK you can not get the information of the developer from the Package Manager.

If you still need the information badly, one method that may work for you is:

Get the package from PackageManager
Scrape the Play Market Page as we already know that you can get to the landing page of any application using the package name eg. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details**?id=com.example.package.name**

I know that this is not the best solution but it will work. Here you can read about Web Scraping just in case you are not aware of it.

Problem with this approach is that if Google changes the play market structure you might need to right a scraper again.

Hope this helps :)

I would like to know as well if there's any other better method than this.

How to get Android developer identity information from within Android app code?

1 Answers1