In-App Updates Android: Tips & Tricks
This blog was featured in Android Weekly’s #379 issue
Recently I was working with in-app updates in Android and I found this API extremely useful but there are certain parts where this API can be a bit confusing.
So before we begin, let’s have a quick overview of the in-app updates API. As a developer we want our users to use the latest version of the app but often users have not enabled auto updates and might be using an app version which was released months ago. This is the exact problem that is tackled by in-app updates, it provides two types of updates for the users:
- Flexible Updates: One would want to implement flexible updates when the updates are not critical but you want the user to know that there is an update.
- Immediate update: This is a full screen user experience where the user is asked to update the app. I would recommend to use this type of update only when it is extremely important like if your app is crashing or there is a vulnerability in your app that you don’t want the user to exploit.
I would recommend reading the Android documentation if you are interested in implementing in-app updates in your app.
There are few things that I would like to highlight about in-app updates:
- The code snippet below is used to check for updates and I have copied it from the Android documentation.
So when I was implementing in-app updates, this line below looked weird to me. How can this library(Play Core) tell me the type of the update that I have implemented?(something that is only declared in my code)
appUpdateInfo.isUpdateTypeAllowed(AppUpdateType.IMMEDIATE)So it turns out, it can’t 😝 The above code is always true whenever there is an available update. My guess is that may be in the future versions of this library there will be an option to toggle between FLEXIBLE and IMMEDIATE updates from the Play console. At the time of writing this article, the above line of code is redundant so there’s no need to include it.
- IMMEDIATE Update != Forced update
Although the library provides you a full screen user experience but the user has the option of cancelling the update by clicking on the cross at the top right. So if you want to implement a forced update using immediate update, you will have to handle this case yourself in the onActivityResult.
- Testing in-app updates can be a little tricky. You can not test in-app updates in a debug app, you need to create a release apk with the same signing keys and application id as you have submitted in the Google Play Store. Another thing that I want to highlight is that if your app uses app signing, you will not be able to get the app update since Google will re sign the app and your release apk will have different signing keys. Also in-app updates are available to only those accounts that have downloaded the app at least once so make sure you have downloaded the app from Google Play once before testing the release apk. Lastly don’t forget to lower your version code so that Google Play can send an update.
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