无需用户交互即可自动更新Android应用

Question

From what I gather, android apps are updated by downloading the apk from the android market, and having the user confirm the update. I also gather that the app needs user confirmation before the update can push through if the droid isn't rooted. I want to know if it's possible to update an app in an unrooted phone remotely, without requiring any user interaction, with the app being located on a non-market server.

Right now, I only know about installing apps via the marketplace, and through adb. Are there other ways, perhaps?

Answer 1

You cannot do it totally remote, its against android security model. You could roll your own updater to remotely manage your application files, preferences, database... but you cannot update your code and you certainly cannot update your apk.

So my suggestion is, if you really need to do exactly that, write some script interpreter, possibly aided via reflection, give it all the permissions you may possibly ever need, and remotely update the logic in your script files. I'd be interesting in here how that goes.

Answer 2

To implement this, I created a separate app that would download the updated APK and run an intent to install the update. I cannot remember what parameters the Intent had, but that's the basic way of how I updated without going through Market. I never did get to pass the user-confirmation part.

Answer 3

From, my uderstanding of the question above. I have created an app which is constatnly updating, in order to do this I am using web services.

1 - Create the app and on first load create a file such as 'version.txt with text such as 1.0.0' 2 - Every time I load up this app I check what number the version.txt currently has and return it 3 - I then use my web services to return a version number to my app (this is simply a folder named 1.0.1) 4 - If this does not match I create a popup indicating a new version is avaiable 5 - If the user downloads this I simply download all the files from the web services and move the to the relevent position

Bare in mind you will require an initial update into the market. Hope this helps.

Answer 4

This an approach for corporate use or any other way which it doesn't use the Google Play store but I still think the approach is very interesting

http://blog.vivekpanyam.com/evolve-seamlessly-deploy-android-apps-to-users/?hn

Answer 5

I don't know about remotely, but the Market application already handles the automatic update case. There is a checkbox within each app you own to enable automatic updating.