Request to supplement direct APK download experience.

[Chixcemz]

First off, I very much appreciate the ability to download the APK outside of the Google Play store.

Keeping the APK up to date on my device, via a third party app such as Obtainium - GitHub page , would be much smoother if there was JSON similar to what Signal provides here which shows the direct download link to the APK, and optional details about the APK. Keeping with the Signal example, their direct APK download page only has a button and version info, with the JSON only existing for power users to programmatically keep it up to date.

Example:

{ "versionCode": 250612, "versionName": "3.2.98", "sha256sum": "627C558A228AE5B1EF87CD2B7C9BEB1BB32E3617C0251961A415F9BD6692FACC", "url": "https://azcdn.pleco.com/androidapps/plecodroid-250612-website.apk", "uploadTimestamp": 1749393462000 }

I hope this is a request you could toss in your backlog and eventually integrate into your deployment pipeline.

 

[mikelove]

We're actually pretty deliberate about waiting on those, though we probably shouldn't wait quite as long - basically, since we don't have a good way to push updates to the APK except by running the APK and having it check for updates itself, we don't want to update the APK version until the Play version has been out for a little while and we're confident that it's not crashing on startup for anyone. (while I know that wouldn't be a problem for power users who can simply check for / install an updated APK, a lot of our APK users are simply people who don't have access to the Play Store because they're in China, and they might not have as easy a time figuring out what to do if the app suddenly stopped working)

We've been kind of delinquent about that and update notes lately because frankly we're trying really hard to finish up our 4.0 update on iOS and putting most of our energy into that, but that's the intent at least.