Playstore vs direct apk install

[nitinmish]

Hello Gurus,

I have this very peculiar situation. We have a bunch of apps that we have published on Google Playstore. The eco-system that we are operating, most of the consumers of the app have smart phone, however do not have a gmail ID. Thus, we have to pass on the APK to their phone and install. We have now grown our base to around 400+, however, now we have two environments. Those who have installed from Google Playstore and others where we have installed the app directly from a URL hosting our APK. And now we have to upgrade these apps to newer version.

My confusion are as follows:

• How does google track the app instance downloaded from apk directly vs the ones installed through playstore?
• Does this app directly upgrade from playstore, even though they were downloaded from the URL?
• What about those installs, where PS is not activated through playstore? Do they get tracked by Google?

Please help.

Regards,
Nitin

 

[argedion]

Welcome to the forums we are glad you are here

To make this simple I had an Amazon account that I had gotten a few free apps from that were also offered at the Google Play store. Google would not recognize that those apps were infact installed on my phone. One of the apps was a paid app on Google and when an update was available for the app Google would not update it. I'm assuming this is because Google had no record of me purchasing said app. Which I didn't I got it as a Free app from Amazon but Amazon didn't update it either so I just purchased it from the play store and removed Amazon. This was a couple of years ago and I am only assuming that it has not changed.

 

[funkylogik]

Yeah people downloading the apk from your url wont get updates from Play. To google, those users dont exist :thumbup:

 

[BRAINZ2013]

Isn't this the app security users asked for . this also go for the apks some users love such as me the modded app. Yes that Google or chrome that is all black .