Distributing In App Android Updates

Introduction

Daily, we come across tens and twenties of updates average, of our apps installed in our smartphones. These updates consist of different types ie. Bug fixes, new feature functionalities, crash fixes, old devices support backward compatibility and even promotional stuff. But how often do we update them? Even after being duly acknowledged about the fact that the new updates consist of what is needed to keep it alive.

Problem

This brings us to the problem area. Often developers face a ghastly problem of distributing app updates to their users without bugging them off frequently. Because that may lead to losing a user in the first place. It is a silent yet widely known notion that it's easy to lose a user rather than gaining and keeping its trust alive in the product that you built tirelessly. Let's face it, no mobile application is bug-free. There can always be circumstances either caused by the user or the app developers while introducing new features which can result in potential bugs or worse, fatal crashes. Which is why we need a subtle solution to ensure that users are informed about the updates in time. 

Solution

Considering an average Android Smartphone user has at least 30 apps on its phone, a user gets rather reluctant to update all of them in just one go. And that entirely is up to user decision. But the best course of action that can be taken in that case is to provide it with In-App updates. Consider a scenario where the user opens a certain app and that shows a dialog asking it to update to the latest version of the app available on the Google Play Store. We must first check whether a new version is available on the Play Store or not. To check that we can use a fantastic time-saving 3rd Party Library that returns us the current version of the app called, Jsoup. Jsoup is a library that works with HTML and it provides the results to your requests using DOM, CSS, and jquery. Lets witness Jsoup in action.

try {
            playStoreVersion = Jsoup.connect("https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id="+context.getPackageName()+"&hl=en")
                    .timeout(10000)
                    .userAgent("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WindowsNT 5.1; en-US; rv1.8.1.6)")
                    .referrer("http://www.google.com")
                    .get()
                    .select("div.hAyfc:nth-child(4) > span:nth-child(2) > div:nth-child(1) > span:nth-child(1)")
                    .first()
                    .ownText();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            Logger.LogError(VersionChecker.class.getSimpleName(), e.getMessage());
        }

context.getPackageName() 

 @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(Void aVoid) {
        super.onPostExecute(aVoid);
        Logger.LogError("Play Store Version", playStoreVersion);
        checkForUpdate();
    }

    private void checkForUpdate(){
        if(!BuildConfig.VERSION_NAME.equals(playStoreVersion)){
            createAndShowUpdateDialog();
        }
    }