Failed installation report for android

Question

The developer console for android has functionality for reporting runtime crashes if users decide to report a crash. Other frameworks has similar features that sends crash-reports without involving the user.

Does anyone know of a way to report installations or upgrades that has failed? With android 5.0 I am getting more and more user-reports of failed installs, but it is hard to obtain logs from non-technical users of my app.

Answer 1

You cannot detect whether or not an installation has failed yourself, because there is no way to execute code before your app is actually installed. So the logical app to do such a thing would be the market app triggering the install (i.e. Google Play). This not only knows when each installation starts, but also knows all details about the apk to report to the right developer.

Unfortunately however, Google play does not support this currently (as far as I know) and hence you cannot detect failed installs.

On older Android phones you could ask users is to install a "logcat app" and email the logs to you for analysis, but this will only work for devices older than Jelly bean. (Read this Link)

The best solution I can come up with (Mac only) is to ask users to install AndroidTool, press one button to generate a bugreport and email that to you. Not great, but for now the best you can do.

Answer 2

You can build an api that reports successful installation. Just call the api in onCreate of first activity. I don't think there is need to collect log on why the installation failed, is it needed ? You can do the same for upgrade, call an api one time from upgraded code.