I am doing some research before developing my application. Just to give you a brief about what I intend to do is the following:
Develop a cross platform app (ios,android,blackberry,windows phone and pc)
This app will be linked to various third party apps (can be either installed or need to be installed).
I've already found some info how to open third party apps: ios and android. I am searching for other services (windows phone and blackberry) and could not find anything or I'm typing the wrong keywords in Google search.!!
For Iphone I found the following:
itms-apps://
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pages/id361309726?mt=8&uo=4
Use the iTunes Link Maker at http://itunes.apple.com/linkmaker to create a link to any app.
For Android:
http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/linking.html#OpeningPublisher
Both the above are linking to App store and Play Store accordingly. How can I link to an already installed app if the app is installed.
Thanks
For Android ONLY
The Android ecosystem is based on Intent and ContentProvider. The only thing you need to know to launch activity / application is either a intent action and/or a content provider Uri.
Let's take an example: you have the IMDB id of a movie and you want to open up the detail page through the IMBD Android app. In that case you can do something like:
Intent detail = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("imdb://<imdb_id>"));
if (context.getPackageManager().resolveActivity(test, 0) != null) {
startActivity(this, detail);
} else {
Toast.makeText(this, "IMDB not installed", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
}
because the IMDB app provides a content provider with the prefix imdb://.
If the app provides an activity with a defined action filter, you just need to know this exact action like such:
startActivity(this, new Intent("target.app.action"));
Few years ago, there was a website that listed all open intents that you could use. It still exists but seems abandoned => http://www.openintents.org/
Related
I have a unity app built for Windows desktop. Client wants this to be distributed through Windows 10 Store. This is just a desktop app and has no support to tabs or phones.
But looks like with Windows 10 there is no desktop only option.
Is there any documentation on what are the steps I need to follow to submit the unity built app to Windows store?
I did some reading and looks like this is what I will have to do.
https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/One-Dev-Minute/How-to-publish-your-Unity-game-as-a-UWP-app
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/win_cert/windows-certification-portal
But want to get a confirmation from some one who has already done that. As I don't have a Windows developer account right now to try that out.
Is there any documentation on what are the steps I need to follow to submit the unity built app to Windows store?
The steps of publishing a unity app is similar to UWP app. You can refer to App Submissions for more details.
After your packages have been successfully uploaded, you will find the Device family availability section that indicates which packages will be offered to specific Windows 10 device families.
For your requirement, you could check Windows 10 Desktop device option, as the follow picture shows:
For more info, you could refer to Device family availability official document.
So I've lost the keystore file for my Xamarin App when my machine crashed. After cursing myself for not saving it, I've finally accepted that I need to create new app in playstore. I know I can unpublish an app in play store. What I wanted to know is, how can I tell the user to uninstall the old app and install the new one?
You can not change the old app in any way, so you are limited in what you can do and you can not force the users to do anything...
Personally I would not un-publish the old one at first, but it really depends upon the number of users and the reviews the app has. ;-)
If your old app has a number of good to great reviews and a better than avg. rating, keep it listed until your new app is at least equal. Google Play Store ranking algorithms use rating and reviews (among other things), so do not throw this away until your new app can match the old one...
You can update the old Application description in the Play Store without changing the .apk:
Add additional content to your old description that users surfing in the store should install the new app. Remember the first 167 characters are used in search results and becomes the metacontent so do not waste those characters...
Include a Url link in your old app description to your new app in the store (play.google.com). This link will be clickable in a browser, but not in the Play App on a device
Make sure to label your new app that is a new application as new and improved-style wording will catch the eye of a user in the Play Store
Also for existing users, make sure the your installed new app icon and name are different and standout from old app (you want to visually drive people to your new app once it is on the device)
If someone installs your new old and still has your old app installed, your new app can check via the PackageManager and prompt the user to uninstall it:
var pm = Application.Context.PackageManager;
var apps = pm.GetInstalledPackages(Android.Content.PM.PackageInfoFlags.MatchAll);
foreach (var app in apps)
{
if (app.PackageName == "com.sushihangover.SomeOldApp")
{
// Display dialog to tell user to uninstall old app...
}
}
If you old app has any New News section that you can publish content to, ability to receive a remote notification and display a message to the user, etc... make use of it to notify the user that there is a brand new app available via the Play Store....
Backup those new keys ;-)
We have an Android application that we have developed and are testing with ARC. Part of the functionality is to share Word/PDF and other documents with other applications on an Android device and then have them pass the content back to us when done. However, since ARC applications run in their own sandbox instance of Android there are no other applications to share with using the standard intents. I know that Chrome Extensions can message each other, but is there a way to access this functionality from an Android APP running arc. Ideally we'd like to share a document have it open in say Google Drive, and then be able to get it back from there using the standard Android intents. Is this possible, or do we have to look at other ways to accomplish this (i.e. SDKs.)
Update: Here is the code we use to launch external activities to have them open files for editing:
Uri uri = Uri.fromFile(attachmentFile);
Intent intentUrl = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
intentUrl.setDataAndType(uri, applicationType);
intentUrl.setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP);
getContext().startActivity(externalActivityIntent);
You can get the file from Google Drive or any other file provider available on the chromeOS using the new intent: ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT
A few weeks ago, we completed the approval process to get our app listed in the Google Apps Marketplace. It does appear on that site and all is fine. However it is not listed in the contextual Apps Marketplace widget in the Google Apps admin console.
I've read in another post that since November 19th the Apps Marketplace has a new back-end based on the Chrome Web Store, and that only the apps added since then appear in the contextual widget.
So my question is: what will happen to the apps listed in the "old" Marketplace? Will they get automatically migrated to the new back-end at some point? Or do we need to start over the whole publishing process again using the new Marketplace SDK?
We will be launching an API in a few weeks to allow developers to automatically move the domains that installed the legacy (OAuth 1/OpenID) based apps to the new Chrome Web Store (and OAuth2) based Apps Marketplace.
In the mean time, the first step is to create a new listing using the GAM SDK following the steps in the docs so that new domains can install the modern app and then you can migrate the older domains when we launch the API.
https://developers.google.com/apps-marketplace/
What the WP7 application needs to do?
- download some others applications and install them automatically on the device.
The device will send first a request to a web server with some rules and will receive an answer containing the links to the applications that need
to be downloaded and installed on the device.
As far as I read, the Marketplace is the only way to get apps on a Windows Phone 7 device, so let's suppose that the applications I want to
install are already on the Marketplace and I can refer to each one by their links (according to this post).
Can I download programmatically an application from the MarketPlace (having the link to it) in another application and install it
on the device?
I do not want to open the app link in browser because this opens the Marketplace hub and points me to the application location.
Just for my curiosity: every time you want to install an application from Marketplace you need to sign in with a Windows Live ID?
Thanks & Regards,
Paul
You cannot dynamically download or execute code or install applications on WP7. The closest you can get is launching a MarketplaceDetailTask which directs the user to a page on the marketplace where they can choose to download the application.
The user's Live ID remains signed in until they sign out from Settings so, no, they don't have to sign in more than once.