Notifying users in app about app updates

Development
1

This Change title of link "Leave a review" for "Check for updates" topic raised an issue with Android.

Namely, auto-update on Android is not per-app, it's per-device and that can be annoying. It'd be nice if we could somehow notify users that their version of Collect is out of date. My initial reaction was that we can just parse the Google Play Store listing, but it seems to me we can do something that's more broadly useful to the ODK project as a whole.

That is, we could ping Github's releases page every few days and if there is a new version, then we notify users maybe 24 hours later (gives time for the release to show up on Play Store).

@issa You have this functionality in Build, right? How is it implemented?

2

Here is what I found out :
https://github.com/javiersantos/AppUpdater (but seems library hasn't been maintained recently)
Seems like it is perfect for required functionality.
There are other alternatives suggested here :
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25201349/programmatically-check-play-store-for-app-updates
(some answers are pretty old)
@yanokwa if you specifically find something to try out, please suggest it. I will implement it.

3

Thanks for the initial research, @Akshay_Patel!

I was hoping that we can think more broadly than just for Collect because we need this for all the tools. Have you see anything that would work well for Briefcase, Build, and Aggregate?

4

I haven't gone through other tools yet. But will try to find if there is something can be used for every other tool.

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5

A bit late to reply here but the answer is here. It's very quick and a little dirty, but there doesn't seem to be anything prebuilt for this.

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