New APIs are a major win for third-party app stores
Google was recently ordered by the Competition Committee of India to fundamentally change some of its anti-competitive practices, and we’re finally starting to see some real-life results with a set of new APIs in Android 14. These additions are primarily aimed at helping third-party app stores like Amazon, APKMirror, and F-Droid reach feature parity with the Play Store.
XDA’s Mishaal Rahman dug up a set of changes in the Android 14 API documentation, which helps app developers learn to use new tools being made available in the forthcoming OS version. After Android 12 finally made it possible for third-party app stores to automatically update the apps they install, Google’s 2023 release is looking to improve the experience for users and app stores alike.
The biggest change is Android 14’s new Gentle Updates API, which allows third-party app stores to ensure you’re not using an app before automatically updating it in the background. App stores can now check that the app being updated isn’t currently on the screen, running a foreground service, or interacting with you in any way. They can also check to make sure your device isn’t currently in Doze Mode or making a phone call before updating an app.
While each of these things can be checked manually by third-party app stores, Google recommends that developers use the presets it provides for this new Gentle Updates system to determine if it’s a good time to update an app — after all, years of Play Store telemetry data can’t be too far off base. And even though this information could already be gleaned from various older Android APIs, this new system doesn’t require app stores to ask for access to sensitive permissions in order to know when it’s safe to automatically update an app.
There’s also a new Update Ownership API that lets a third-party app store become the sole source for future updates to an app that it initially installed, resolving a potential conflict where an app installed by the third-party app store could be updated by the Play Store’s automatic updates system. This should be helpful for stores like Obtainium, which sends out updates for open-source apps directly from the developer’s releases page and can often outpace the Play Store on releases.
Once an app store is updated to take advantage of the new API, it should automatically be granted the ENFORCE_UPDATE_OWNERSHIP permission required to utilize these new features. However, third-party app stores would have to declare ownership of updates when first installing an app, so this wouldn’t work for existing apps you might have installed through the app store — in other words, you’d have to reinstall an app before the Update Ownership API would become available for it.
Finally, a User Preapproval API lets third-party app stores display a prompt before installing an update to an app. This should be useful when an app has a major feature overhaul or adds granted-at-runtime permissions that the app store thinks you might want to be aware of before an automatic update takes place.
It should be noted that these and any other new APIs aren’t going to be finalized until June 2023, according to the Android 14 release timetable. So these features could change as the new version moves from developer preview builds to beta releases, but we wouldn’t expect Google to outright drop the APIs considering the legal pressure it’s facing.
