Android – How Android app install tracking works

androidinstallationtracking

can anybody here explain how android app referral tracking works? a friend gave me an android app's google play referral url. And i installed the app and opened it. How does the app developer know that it's my friend who referred me to their app? I know that the link that my friend gave me contains his referral details but if i close google play after completing the app install, how can google play detect that i opened the app? So some unique data is injected into the app while i install it from playstore. am i right? Please explain.

Best Answer

It's quite simple actually. You click on the link with a referral (Google calls them Campaing Attribution) and this link is passed to the Google Play Store app. Then, when you install the app, the Play Store also forwards this data (campaign name, source, &c) to the app itself.

The app just needs to have a particular BroadcastReceiver (with an intent-filter for the com.android.vending.INSTALL_REFERRER action) declared in its Manifest for this to work.

It's well explained in the Google Play Campaign Attribution section of the Google Analytics documentation.

Related Solutions

Android – How to close/hide the Android soft keyboard programmatically

You can force Android to hide the virtual keyboard using the InputMethodManager, calling hideSoftInputFromWindow, passing in the token of the window containing your focused view.

// Check if no view has focus:
View view = this.getCurrentFocus();
if (view != null) {  
    InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
    imm.hideSoftInputFromWindow(view.getWindowToken(), 0);
}

This will force the keyboard to be hidden in all situations. In some cases, you will want to pass in InputMethodManager.HIDE_IMPLICIT_ONLY as the second parameter to ensure you only hide the keyboard when the user didn't explicitly force it to appear (by holding down the menu).

Note: If you want to do this in Kotlin, use: context?.getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE) as InputMethodManager

Kotlin Syntax

// Only runs if there is a view that is currently focused
this.currentFocus?.let { view ->
    val imm = getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE) as? InputMethodManager
    imm?.hideSoftInputFromWindow(view.windowToken, 0)
}

Android – How to stop EditText from gaining focus at Activity startup in Android

Excellent answers from Luc and Mark. However, a good code sample is missing. Adding the tags android:focusableInTouchMode="true" and android:focusable="true" to the parent layout (e.g. LinearLayout or ConstraintLayout) like in the following example, will fix the problem.

<!-- Dummy item to prevent AutoCompleteTextView from receiving focus -->
<LinearLayout
    android:focusable="true" 
    android:focusableInTouchMode="true"
    android:layout_width="0px" 
    android:layout_height="0px"/>

<!-- :nextFocusUp and :nextFocusLeft have been set to the id of this component
to prevent the dummy from receiving focus again -->
<AutoCompleteTextView android:id="@+id/autotext"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:nextFocusUp="@id/autotext" 
    android:nextFocusLeft="@id/autotext"/>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Android – How to close/hide the Android soft keyboard programmatically

Android – How to stop EditText from gaining focus at Activity startup in Android

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