Hello!
I own an Xperia Play and I am a resident of a country where even the google play store is not available.
But since phones arrive here pre-installed with software from whereever they are built, so I had an android market by default which recently forced me to update it to Google Play which too is working just fine. So unless I uninstall this on purpose Google Inc. can't do anything to deprive me of Google play.
But the thing is that there was no Google Play Books or Movies in the previous Android market hence I can't do anything to un-deprive me of them.
My questions are
1. Can anybody explain to me why is Google Inc. keeping these apps away from the international market when they are officially launching their phones there? I mean it doesn't make any sense to me. The stupidity is (at least that's what I believe, correct me if I am wrong) that if I fly to London, locate a WiFi hotspot, download these stores, and fly back; there is nothing in the power of Google to do anything about it, so what is it; racism? Besides without an app store a smartphone is as dull as a Nokia. Sorry Nokia.
2. Where can I find a list enlisting the countries where these app stores are available? Hurry I need to book a flight.
3. How do I talk to Google about this matter. I mean we have a website for Google play or Android Market but it displays the apps not any information about the store itself. In fact there is not even a dedicated Android website. There isn't even a place to download the official APK in case you need it, not even for those living in Google's favorite countries. Which brings me to next question.
4. How were you guys informed of the availability of these stores. I understand that the new phones had them pre-installed. But what about those like me except living in U.S. for instance. Did you guys get a notification? Or did you wake up one morning and realized that Google Books had miraculously installed? How was the experience?
5. And most importantly, can someone of you guys, possibly an Xperia Play user (just to make sure I get the right APK if they are hardware dependent) post his/her Books and Movies APK here or anywhere else and inform me of the location. There are a lot of APKs available out there but I worry that they have been altered by programmers to suit there own needs.
Please do reply in detail and as soon as possible.
Thank you for your time.
I think it's to do with media licencing.
The same reason that different games are available at different prices in different countries via steam, or not available at all in some countries.
Here in Australia I only have access to apps, games and books via Google Play. No music or movies.
Ahahaha, racism
But seriously, it has to do with licensing. If a company wants to sell things, they're not going to play favorites by not selling in certain countries.
it has nothing to do with racism.
it's completely about licensing, and I think looking at it from a business point of view would prove why.
India, having such a big population, simply means more sale/ greater sales area for google, so they wouldn't be ignoring you by any means.
honestly it would be your government that has a problem with google and is stopping google on some level.
just my opinion though, I believe it would be fairly close.
Have you tried modaco's xperia forum?
Hope this helped out
spiritofcat said:
I think it's to do with media licencing.
The same reason that different games are available at different prices in different countries via steam, or not available at all in some countries.
Here in Australia I only have access to apps, games and books via Google Play. No music or movies.
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voryzen said:
it has nothing to do with racism.
it's completely about licensing, and I think looking at it from a business point of view would prove why.
India, having such a big population, simply means more sale/ greater sales area for google, so they wouldn't be ignoring you by any means.
honestly it would be your government that has a problem with google and is stopping google on some level.
just my opinion though, I believe it would be fairly close.
Have you tried modaco's xperia forum?
Hope this helped out
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Ah, trust the Aussies to come in here and tell it like a Sir. Good to see.
Licensing is exactly the issue. It's whether Google's services contravene your home Country's laws and regulations for media distribution.
As these services are built for the US, it's only natural they get them all. It most definitely has nothing to do with racism, believe me if Google were allowed to collect data on every human being on the planet - they would.
And as for the apk files you can usr market enabler and set it to usa to download the apps from the play store or you can google for them.These apps are not hardware dependant.
Sent from my LG-P350 using xda premium
nerot said:
And as for the apk files you can usr market enabler and set it to usa to download the apps from the play store or you can google for them.These apps are not hardware dependant.
Sent from my LG-P350 using xda premium
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Hello!
Thanks for the reply.
I know it isn't racism, it was just a way to get people reading.
But if it is about licensing then I believe they don't take that issue seriously either.
I am from the Middle East (not India), and they do launch phones here officially, I mean it isn't that they are imported here by some third party, and yet initially these phones have Android Market or Google Play (now) available on them. It gets deleted only when your phones get an official service here from the official service centers.
So, should I be hopeless about getting Google Books or Movies here, anytime soon?
Here's what I think is the case. They (Google) probably think that they don't have many customers in this region or any region besides Europe or America or Australia. And I need to get a word to them. That's why I inquired about a contact place or some sort of Google's website. I mean it's amazing that Google rules the internet but hasn't got its own website.
If it had to be about licensing, then how come I am able to buy e-books, for instance, on websites like Kobo, Amazon etc. Same goes for music and movies.
All I have to do is Pay. Like i said before if I go to London, download the Google Books or Movies, and get back; i can easily enjoy it here. All I have to do is pay through credit card, and generally a credit card has no boundaries. I mean nobody rejects your credit card in Moscow because it was issued in Luxembourg, or do they?
And secondly, can somebody of you guys (of course living in UK or USA) upload your APK of Google Books and Google Movies somewhere on the internet and make me aware of it. I think you can locate it using Astro.
Thanks.
Watch the attitude please
broncogr said:
Watch the attitude please
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Ah ................ What?
What he is trying to say, is you didn't need to post it twice. We know your frustrated and are powerless to do anything about it ourselves.
Maybe you would be better off taking this up with google instead?
Hope this helps
Sent from my HTC One X using XDA
Jack Shepard said:
Hello!
Thanks for the reply.
I know it isn't racism, it was just a way to get people reading.
But if it is about licensing then I believe they don't take that issue seriously either.
I am from the Middle East (not India), and they do launch phones here officially, I mean it isn't that they are imported here by some third party, and yet initially these phones have Android Market or Google Play (now) available on them. It gets deleted only when your phones get an official service here from the official service centers.
So, should I be hopeless about getting Google Books or Movies here, anytime soon?
Here's what I think is the case. They (Google) probably think that they don't have many customers in this region or any region besides Europe or America or Australia. And I need to get a word to them. That's why I inquired about a contact place or some sort of Google's website. I mean it's amazing that Google rules the internet but hasn't got its own website.
If it had to be about licensing, then how come I am able to buy e-books, for instance, on websites like Kobo, Amazon etc. Same goes for music and movies.
All I have to do is Pay. Like i said before if I go to London, download the Google Books or Movies, and get back; i can easily enjoy it here. All I have to do is pay through credit card, and generally a credit card has no boundaries. I mean nobody rejects your credit card in Moscow because it was issued in Luxembourg, or do they?
And secondly, can somebody of you guys (of course living in UK or USA) upload your APK of Google Books and Google Movies somewhere on the internet and make me aware of it. I think you can locate it using Astro.
Thanks.
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Click to collapse
Google books and Google movies are built into the Google play store. If your government refuses to do what Google requires to allow them to use it then there is nothing g you can do. There are a few countries that like to control what is seen by its citizens. Take China for instance, they have complete control and Google market is not installed by default. If the play store is removed when you get am official update then that tells you it is a government thing and you need to talk to them about it.
Hungary: No music, or movies, not even books. Only Apps. Great!
Executioner1337 said:
Hungary: No music, or movies, not even books. Only Apps. Great!
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Same here in Serbia
Sent from my Optimus Me using xda premium
According to Google play stores free apps are available to users in any country with just books movies and paid apps being restricted due to licensing agreements and in certain countries also due to the government.
You can of course work around some restrictions, if you look in the apps section here at xda there are modified or patched free apps to help you do so such as most recently a modified market app.
Dave
Sent from my LG P920 using Tapatalk
Same in Romania - only apps in Play (at the beginning only free apps were allowed but now we can buy without restriction).
But isn't racism, as others already pointed out. Is about copyright, licensing agreements or government censorship.
And this isn't restricted to Google Play. As an example - i couldn't buy RAGE from Steam (because wasn't available in Romania) but i bought a retail version at the store and i was able to use the key even on Steam. So, in other words, is about who and what can sell in a certain region. So, you can buy a book from London and read it in Middle East, as you say, because you own it. But you can't buy it in your country because of some stupid law in your country or because some producer/seller/editor have no interest in your country (again, not because of racism, but because they consider that the income won't justify the investment - in Romania we still can't buy games from PSN or play on PSN, even if Sony sell Playstation in Romania since Adam banged Eve).
I want to know how to make device as from -for example- US to get extra features for applications, such as Shazam LyricPlay (its only working devices from US, and few other countries).
I have a Nexus 7 tablet too, and I use a custom rom which has US market inside, so I can read books etc whenever I am, and I can use shazam LyricPlay too in my tablet. I want to know hot to achieve same thing for my SGSIII because shazam lyricplay is a cool feature. I have tried market enabler kind applications, fake location applications which didn't work.
So please if anyone knows, it will be apreciated.
Thanks.
I'm also interested.Anyone know how to do this?
Sent from my GT-I9300 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app
CSC and build prop changes i guess .
But most likely an app on Play or even in Themes and Apps
Was just wondering what peoples thoughts were on using the Android Licensing copy protection in their apps? Do you use it and do you spend a lot of time on it or have any creative ways to help enforce it?
As we all know any kind of drm will always be cracked but I just wanted to know if people found it worthwhile to have..
I'm using In-app-billing, because I found that even licensed apps can be copied.
And yes, all apps can be cracked eventually, but most of the publishers of cracked apps remove them if you ask to. So that's what I'm gonna do!
Sent from my Nexus 4 running Android 4.2 JB
I don't like license checks that force you to be online, but I do like to have 'something' in place...
Recently I started working with some OEMs in India who wanted to pre-load my apps on their devices. Very exciting obviously, but I didn't know if I could trust them as I'd never heard of them.
So what I did was get the app to load a web page on one of my servers off the screen (9000%x...) so that it couldn't be seen. The page it linked to was empty, but if I wanted to I could modify the code to include a redirect that would send it to another page. Then in my 'onPageOverride' event I just said if URL = 'stopapp.htm' then do whatever it was I wanted to do.
What I actually have it do in that event is to fill the entire screen with that web page. The user then can't interact with the app underneath, but they get a message that I can create at the time saying 'This app has been illegally distributed' or whatever else I want to say. I can even forward them on to the download page if I want this way.
This works well too because if the user isn't online, the page just doesn't load and nothing happens. But if I want to stop offline use as well I can save a file in File.DirInternal and have the app check for that. 'SwitchOff.txt'. They get caught once, then they can't use the app.
Obviously this doesn't work quite like a license check, but what you *could* do with it is to have the app pop up with a message to people using an old version that's not updated. That's probably downloaded off of some file sharing site, so you could then just keep pestering them to 'update' and send them to the Play Store to do so. You can also check how many of the users on that version of your app are legitimate by looking at your Play Developer Console.
One thing to note is that the redirect URLs you use will need to be different in every version of your app that you release.
Hope this helps someone! I wish I'd done it sooner, one of my apps is all over the web grrrr...
pretty much the same as what I'm doing atm except I just ping a server in the background and display a popup if the result meets certain conditions.. I don't disable the app either as I can't be 100% certain it's pirated, instead I display a "scary" popup saying if they're using a pirated copy this is illegal etc.. your average user won't know how the popup was generated so it should be enough to make them think "someone" is onto them and go the proper route.. With the added bonus a genuine user can just press ok and carry on using the app
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4
Currently, none of my apps use licensing.
For one of my paid apps, about 5% of the downloads are from non-Google Play sources, meaning, I'm not seeing any revenue from those 5%.
There is an Android API, that allows developers to see which platform their app was downloaded from. So, I've been thinking about adding that hidden feature to my apps and maybe do something fun with it. But, haven't got around to it yet. My thinking has been that if somebody downloaded a pirated copy of my app, then they probably weren't going to pay for it in the first place. And, hopefully, they will tell their friends about it and maybe one of them will actually purchase it through Google Play.
I already have all my licensing code in place and commented out. Since my app is pretty new I want to see how it does before adding licensing. Since the app is free and income is from IAP its not too bad. I'd only turn on licensing in the next release if I see a pressing need for it.
Currently, none of my apps use licensing.
I've been asked to create an app at work. It's for a membership we sell that gives people access to numerous gyms in the City. The app will do the usual things a website would e.g. be able to list upcoming classes, and details about the different gyms, but it seems to me like this is app would be rather unuseful as all the info I've been asked to put in the app is on our website, and mobile site.
So I'm curious as to what people think would be good to build into the app. I don't personally go to the gym so I'm not sure what features would be of use to people. All I can think of at the moment is a stopwatch/timer for when people are doing activities.
Does anybody else have any ideas that would be good?
Hello
I'm not a developer but I'm in the process of creating specifications to find a freelance developer to create an app that will be on the Play Store. =)
I'd like to have your insight to see if my application is "possible" regarding the compatibility of various smartphones under Android BUT ALSO regarding the rules imposed by Google for an application to be available on the Play Store.
I want to make an app where you enter the URL of a website, the app will crawl (background task) the site that can have 10,000 pages for example. And the app checks if there are dead links on the site (404 pages, sites that are no longer available etc.).
The app must therefore visit all the pages of the site entered by the app user, with his IP and from his device. It must make all these requests in the background throughout the day.
Does this seem possible ?
Does this sound acceptable to the Play Store rules ?
Do you think it's feasible on the vast majority of Android smartphone models in the world (Nokia, Oppo, Samsung...) ?
Thanks a lot for your help anyway