Evolve Active Development

Are people interested in using Evolve? I realize that not being able to use it in Google Play apps is a big problem. However, it is still useful for many things like beta tests, nightly build releases, and apps on platforms without Google Play.

As you can see, I haven't actively worked on Evolve since early 2014. If there's enough interest, I'd be glad to continue development.

Either way, I'm happy to accept pull requests and help with issues!

Please let me know what you think.

Feb 10 '15 22:02 VivekPanyam

I think its worth to continue...Maybe someday you'll find a better way of achiving the same functionality without 'dummy' activities, which is not quite transparent :)

Feb 11 '15 05:02 serggl

I found the project very intersting and a very elegant way to upgrade the app without having to reinstalle it.

When I tried Evolve I was working on some corparate app where we had full control of Android. In it we had a number of apps installed, one of them (called it updater) was design to check with the server if there where any updates and automatically download and updade all the other apps if any. Much like Google Play but It would do this automatically on the background; at the same time somebody had to update the updater. This would very few and far a part, still had to be done. When I saw your project I was gonna use it to update the updater. It didn't work for me at the time and we used another method.

Certanly, there's a need for a project like yours.

Feb 11 '15 14:02 codeskraps

It's definitely worth continuing, Evolve is a clever use of Android and without it updating our applications would be much harder! In many cases it is preferable to avoid Google Play anyway.

Feb 24 '15 11:02 ravanova

One more vote for this being a really valuable effort. Particularly with the task locking "kiosk" mode in "L", the number of applications which could benefit will go up.

I haven't looked into it, but where does the functionality stand? And what are the issues?

One thing I'd be concerned about would be bricking units with a bad apk -- could a known good APK be kept around to automatically revert to if needed?

May 15 '15 01:05 amitrao17

:+1: This project is promising.

Jun 15 '15 16:06 acrogenesis

I would be very happy to use this for an Android stick application where I don't want to update using the Play Store. At the moment I am not able to get the wrapper example app working with my app.

Jan 27 '16 10:01 pepijntb

I recently stumbled over your project to achieve exactly this, update without google play. Its not that we couldn't release it on play, we just don't want to. Sometimes one has to build an app for a very specific "group" of people and they don't want to see their app on the play store. Even if it has a login, its pretty much useless that other people see an app they cannot login and use it. The problem is that your "framework" is a bit unknown.