Android：使用Facebook共享或推文解锁应用程序的附加功能

Question

I have a free application published on Google Play. I want to add some new features and ask users to 'pay' for them with Facebook shares or tweets.

Scenario:

1. User updates application
2. New features are available in settings but they are not active
3. To activate feature user has to share information about my application on FB or on Tweeter
4. Only if sharing was successful feature will be available to the user.

For me it seems like a good idea to spread information about application in social media... however I can't find any 'out of the box' solution (library or code). Is there any?

Has anybody tried this approach and was it successful?

Also I'm trying to find out if this method is compliant with Google Play policy. I've read https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html with great care but I didn't find any clues. Has anyone got any policy violations emails from Google after implementing this method?

Answer 1

I've been working on something similar for a bit. As far as sharing itself goes, that's fairly straightforward using the ShareActionProvider . There's a tutorial for that here .

However, this doesn't give you any way to determine of the user successfully shared anything, it only provides the ability to share something. You can do something when a share target is selected, however, by using setOnShareTargetSelectedListener() with your own OnShareTargetSelectedListener implementation on your ShareActionProvider .

Again, though, this is problematic because it only allows you to determine whether a user has clicked an application through which to share information, not whether they actually followed through and shared anything. You can go a bit farther by creating your own custom share action and using startActivityForResult() rather than startActivity() , then reading the Intent data and int resultCode from onActivityResult() . This will tell you when the sharing has been complete.

Doing this will, unfortunately, lead you only to another wall. The data and resultCode arguments are passed to your app by the application the user is sharing to, which means they aren't exactly consistent from app to app. In fact, most apps don't even seem to distinguish between whether the user shared something or just exited out without sharing. Usually they just return a resultCode of 0, regardless of whether the share was successful or not. And the data Intent is often times null. Truly, there doesn't seem to be any way to consistently determine if the user actually successfully shared the content.

With this in mind, if your rewards aren't too big, you may consider simply rewarding the user in your OnShareTargetSelectedListener and hope users are trustworthy enough to actually share your application. Or you could rethink whether rewarding users for sharing is the best idea after all. Though as far as I know, it's not against any policy violation. Personally, I think it's a fairly good idea if you're only giving the user small rewards; unfortunately it's a shame that there's no way (at least that I know of) to be able to determine if the user actually shared the content.

I also may be responding to this a month late, but I figure better late than never and it may be a good idea to share my experience in case anyone else was curious as well.

Edit: Just realized you specified Facebook and Twitter. As far as I was able to figure out, Facebook doesn't distinguish whether the user actually shared anything, so implementing this with Facebook is, as described above, not possible. Twitter does actually distinguish a resultCode of -1 when the user shares, and 0 when the user does not, so it may be possible with Twitter.

You could also look at the Facebook API to see if they have any support for something like this, but I haven't checked that out at all.

Answer 2

For Facebook already is an method like: SHARE CALLBACK .And has on success listener. So if shared content is suscefully posted on user Facebook you can write you next action code inside on success listener.