I wonder what are the ways/patterns to detect app uninstallation for any kind of analytics on android? I know the limitations of ACTION_PACKAGE_REMOVED intent - not received by application being removed. I am using flurry at the moment and have also discovered that they do not provide any kind of support for deinstallation events. This type of event is definitely something you want in your analytics but so far have not found any clear solution. Any ideas?
Here's a possible approach. In your Android app, implement support for receiving push messages from Google Cloud Messaging (GGM). Then, implement a server that sends GCM "are you there?" messages to all users at regular intervals (e.g. daily). Google's GCM service will notify your service of all targeted recipients which no longer have your app installed. To correlate uninstall data with other metrics such as app version, user demographics, date of installation, etc, collect that data in your app and supply it to your server when registering for GCM messages. Then when you get notified of an uninstall, match it with the installation data. From there, you could report it to a service like Google Analytics for additional slicing and dicing, graphical visualization, date range comparison, etc.
Related
I have an application that contains order data . I want to send this to all users of this app as notification.My target is to send Push Notifications to all of the users of my applications. How would I accomplish that?
To begin with your app mush already be using GCM and listening to the correct topic. Otherwise you have to roll out an update with the new GCM feature and hope that all users update it.
If you want to see some code for this take a look at this sample i crated some time ago. What you need to implement from the sample is the "SubscribeTopic" part. And to test if its working you can use this java program.
The good thing about topics is that you don’t need to save the users registration tokens and the message is sent to everyone listening for that exact topic.
Use Apache kafka
The original use case for Kafka was to be able to rebuild a user
activity tracking pipeline as a set of real-time publish-subscribe
feeds. This means site activity (page views, searches, or other
actions users may take) is published to central topics with one topic
per activity type. These feeds are available for subscription for a
range of use cases including real-time processing, real-time
monitoring, and loading into Hadoop or offline data warehousing
systems for offline processing and reporting.
To start with, note that a full GCM implementation requires both a client implementation and a server implementation. Before you can write client apps that use GCM, you must have an application server that meets the following criteria:
Able to communicate with your client.
Able to send properly formatted requests to the GCM connection
server.
Able to handle requests and resend them using exponential back-off.
Able to securely store the API key and client registration tokens.
Note: never include the API key in any client code.
For XMPP, the server must be able to generate message IDs to uniquely
identify each message it sends (GCM HTTP connection server generates
message IDs and returns them in the response). XMPP message IDs
should be unique per sender ID.
Complete documentation, how-to-guides for sending messages and links to examples can be found from Cloud Messaging - Messaging Concepts and Options.
You may also check ANDROID AND GCM – BROADCAST YOURSELF for the tutorial and demonstration on the use of GCM for the broadcast of messages to an Android client from a Tomcat server and use of sending broadcastintents from a service and receiving those broadcastintents from an app's activity.
I'm trying to make it such that a click on my web client from a computer can "trigger" the android app to run its set function.
I've searched extensively but it seems like all methods need the mobile device to initiate a connection before the web server can even do anything.
Is there a way for the web client to be the one initiating? Also, is there any way to do this without notifying the user of the device, i.e. in the background? I'm using cakephp for the web client but any kind of answer will be appreciated. Thanks!
Use push notification system to trigger any action on your device. Push notification system such as Parse, PushApps, pubnup etc are available for free and some are paid too. Try them. Send a push notification and listen to that push message and on receiving trigger your action.
Use Google Cloud Messaging .
"Google Cloud Messaging for Android (GCM) is a service that allows you to send data from your server to your users' Android-powered device, and also to receive messages from devices on the same connection. The GCM service handles all aspects of queueing of messages and delivery to the target Android application running on the target device. GCM is completely free no matter how big your messaging needs are, and there are no quotas."[Google]
Here you'll find how to implement the GCM with PHP.
We already have a quite complex mobile backend written in Java which is deployed and works fine, so we do not have any need to use the Google mobile backend. Now we have requirements for pushing some data from the back end to the phone. Earlier I used GCM regularly. Our first requirement is only simple messaging, but it may evolve to something like a pub sub (phones subscribing to topics).
The issue I am not understanding is should I now use GCM like before, and later develop my own pub/sub overlay, or can I use the products Google has developed for that? Is this even possible, since everything I am finding on Google pages is just related to communication between Android phones via their cloud storage, so no library for communication between a custom back end and a phone?
In short, what should I use, regular GCM or is there something Google is providing which I am not understanding?
You can use regular GCM. A custom back-end can send messages to an Android app via GCM. The library for sending messages from a 3rd party server to GCM still exists (com.google.android.gcm.server package in the Google Cloud Messaging for Android Library), but you don't have to use it - you can implement the HTTP POST requests yourself.
If I am developing an Android application, what is the most feasible way to get near real-time notifications about an incoming email? Is there a push-like mechanism, or can I hold my IMAP connection for a long time, or do I use IDLE command?
Consider that user is authorized to use GMail services via OAuth and I don't want to poll IMAP server madly.
Update:
I'm not using the phone's configured-in Google account. There is another account set up using OAuth.
I'm using Apache Commons Net to connect to IMAP/SMTP in my app. It's a bare-bone library for IMAP, but I can perhaps modify it to add IMAP commands/extensions.
You can register a ContentObserver with GMail, anytime something changes in GMail, the observer will be called.
contentResolver.registerContentObserver(Uri.parse("content://gmail-ls"), true, myContentObserver );
Override onChange in your ContentObserver to do stuff when something in GMail changes.
Since IMAP does natively provide any sort of push notifications and the Google extensions don't either, you have to implement it yourself.
One way is to use IDLE requests, which is still a cheap way to do polling. Of course, you can't expect your app to be running all the time, so you need to use a background service. An 'always-on' service is however an anti-pattern on Android and will drain the battery quickly and likely get you many 1-stars. Additionally the system may decide to kill it at any time. The other alternative is to use AlarmManager to start the service periodically, but starting it every couple of seconds or so is just as bad. So you are basically back to square one: polling.
The other way is to get push notifications using GCM or a similar service. This does require you to have a server, and the server needs to have the authentication info for the user (which might be a problem), but there are no real constraints concerning keeping open connections and sending IDLEs each second, etc. On the Android side, if you want to implement push yourself, you need to keep an open socket to get notifications. This is not very easy to do if you are not a system app (see above), so that leaves GCM. The connection it uses is manged by the system (Google Services framework), it can do things a regular app cannot, and you basically get it for free, since it's already there. It receives small pieces of data when there is something to do, called 'tickles'. Those in turn trigger broadcasts, Google Play updates, etc.
So, take your pick. Or just give up, register the account and use GMail and its labels Android API.
I'd check out Google Cloud Messaging (GCM):
http://developer.android.com/training/cloudsync/gcm.html
My understanding is that this works without requiring the user's Google account, and lets you handle authentication.
See a tutorial here:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/app-builder/implementing-googles-cloud-to-device-messaging/428
You would need additional server-side code running to do this though.
I've been working on an android application and I am trying to figure out how to implement a messaging feature for the application to send messages to other phones and to my web app. I have been doing a fair amount of research and I haven't yet found any ways of going about this, or at least not any straightforward ones. Could someone point me in the right direction with this? Is there a relatively simple way to get this functionality? I have found links that show how to use google's cloud service but I am extremely unfamiliar with this so I was wondering if there were other better/simpler implementations or instructions out there. Thanks in advance for the help.
For security and privacy reasons, your phone/tablet app cannot (should not) communicate directly with other devices (unless they're on the same WiFi or similar and explicitly bound via bluetooth .etc)
So the way to do this on Android is use Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM).
Your app will send a web request to your server, with the message and intended recipients.
Your server will look at this, find the C2DM IDs of the recipients, and send the message to Google's C2DM service, which will then be pushed down to each device.
Your app should have a C2DM receiver to receive these messages and process them.
Check here for more information on implementing C2DM
http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/