Checking my app version programmatically in Android market
Google Play does not provide any official APIs for retrieving metadata. You could however, check the unofficial API at http://code.google.com/p/android-market-api/.
Specifically, take a look at the Wiki page HowToSearchApps. The response to the query contains version information:
{
"app": [
{
"rating": "4.642857142857143",
"title": "Ruboto IRB",
"ratingsCount": 14,
"creator": "Jan Berkel",
"appType": "APPLICATION",
"id": "9089465703133677000",
"packageName": "org.jruby.ruboto.irb",
"version": "0.1",
"versionCode": 1,
"creatorId": "\"Jan Berkel\"",
"ExtendedInfo": {
"category": "Tools",
"permissionId": [
...
We can do pattern matching for getting the app version from playStore.
To match the latest pattern from google playstore ie
<div class="BgcNfc">Current Version</div><span class="htlgb"><div><span class="htlgb">X.X.X</span></div>
we first have to match the above node sequence and then from above sequence get the version value. Below is the code snippet for same:
private String getAppVersion(String patternString, String inputString) {
try{
//Create a pattern
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(patternString);
if (null == pattern) {
return null;
}
//Match the pattern string in provided string
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(inputString);
if (null != matcher && matcher.find()) {
return matcher.group(1);
}
}catch (PatternSyntaxException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}
private String getPlayStoreAppVersion(String appUrlString) {
final String currentVersion_PatternSeq = "<div[^>]*?>Current\\sVersion</div><span[^>]*?>(.*?)><div[^>]*?>(.*?)><span[^>]*?>(.*?)</span>";
final String appVersion_PatternSeq = "htlgb\">([^<]*)</s";
String playStoreAppVersion = null;
BufferedReader inReader = null;
URLConnection uc = null;
StringBuilder urlData = new StringBuilder();
final URL url = new URL(appUrlString);
uc = url.openConnection();
if(uc == null) {
return null;
}
uc.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WindowsNT 5.1; en-US; rv1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6");
inReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(uc.getInputStream()));
if (null != inReader) {
String str = "";
while ((str = inReader.readLine()) != null) {
urlData.append(str);
}
}
// Get the current version pattern sequence
String versionString = getAppVersion (currentVersion_PatternSeq, urlData.toString());
if(null == versionString){
return null;
}else{
// get version from "htlgb">X.X.X</span>
playStoreAppVersion = getAppVersion (appVersion_PatternSeq, versionString);
}
return playStoreAppVersion;
}
I got this solved through this. Hope that helps.