October 4, 2013 at 16:19One Platform Foundation: AppDF and OpenIAB Overview
Hello!
Having visited YaC, I became interested in the OnePF project and, to deepen my knowledge about it, I went to the geek magazine
To my surprise, I found only one mention of him, and even then in passing.
Once such a thing, I decided to figure it out myself and share it with the readers
Any Android developer must have heard about the “zoo” of Android devices, but not everyone pays attention to the same thing with Android markets. Many do not notice this, because limited to Google Play, but guys from OnePF summed up statistics that show that the lion's share of app downloads is occupied by alternative GooglePlay markets. Consequently, neglecting them, the developer misses the audience and benefits.
Of course, you can manually add your game to a particular market, but with a large number of markets with different requirements, this turns into a headache ...
It was this problem that OnePF developers tried to automate and solve.
One Platform Foundation is a project engaged in the development of standard mechanisms and tools for comfortable work with many Android markets. Currently, the project is being actively developed and already has two interesting solutions:
App Description File is a special file format containing a description, applications, screenshots, icons and, in fact, the application itself in the APK format.
In essence, an .appdf file is a regular ZIP archive containing the description.xml file. It contains meta information, as well as links to files in the archive.
The main description.xml section describes:
The full specification of the format is available here .
There is no need to write all this manually. You can find the convenient AppDF Editor tool on the OnePF website , with which you can quickly prepare your application for publication.
At the moment, AppDF already support:
The following markets are also actively working on the implementation:
In general, a convenient tool for those who publish their application in many markets.
The second Open In-App Billing project is a library that allows the developer to abstract from the In-App device purchases of a particular market.
How the library works:
OpenIAB does not implement the logic of In-App purchases, it only proxies calls to the necessary market.
The project works with all markets that support in-app purchases:
An example of working with all markets that currently support in-app purchases can be found here .
I think this library will help reduce the time to develop In-App purchases for each individual market. Moreover, there will be more and more of them further.
Despite the fact that there are not so many supported systems, the project is actively developing and is aimed at the overall benefit, because the market will benefit from standardization of these technologies.
Let's hope that major market players will pay attention to him and will cooperate with him for the benefit of universal Android happiness.
I wish the developers to achieve what was planned and so that it doesn’t work out that way .
Good luck
Having visited YaC, I became interested in the OnePF project and, to deepen my knowledge about it, I went to the geek magazine
To my surprise, I found only one mention of him, and even then in passing.
Once such a thing, I decided to figure it out myself and share it with the readers
Any Android developer must have heard about the “zoo” of Android devices, but not everyone pays attention to the same thing with Android markets. Many do not notice this, because limited to Google Play, but guys from OnePF summed up statistics that show that the lion's share of app downloads is occupied by alternative GooglePlay markets. Consequently, neglecting them, the developer misses the audience and benefits.
Of course, you can manually add your game to a particular market, but with a large number of markets with different requirements, this turns into a headache ...
It was this problem that OnePF developers tried to automate and solve.
One Platform Foundation is a project engaged in the development of standard mechanisms and tools for comfortable work with many Android markets. Currently, the project is being actively developed and already has two interesting solutions:
- AppDF is a standardized file format for universal application loading into Android-stores.
- OpenIAB is a library for transparent work with different In-App Billing systems.
Appdf
App Description File is a special file format containing a description, applications, screenshots, icons and, in fact, the application itself in the APK format.
In essence, an .appdf file is a regular ZIP archive containing the description.xml file. It contains meta information, as well as links to files in the archive.
The main description.xml section describes:
- Application Information
- Images
- Age qualification
- The price
- Regional Options
- Requirements
- Testing Instructions
- Market-specific data
The full specification of the format is available here .
There is no need to write all this manually. You can find the convenient AppDF Editor tool on the OnePF website , with which you can quickly prepare your application for publication.
At the moment, AppDF already support:
The following markets are also actively working on the implementation:
In general, a convenient tool for those who publish their application in many markets.
Openiab
The second Open In-App Billing project is a library that allows the developer to abstract from the In-App device purchases of a particular market.
How the library works:
- The developer integrates the library into his program code
- Writes client code for working with In-App purchases using an API very similar to the Google Play IAB API
- OpenIAB defines the market from which the application was installed.
- The library redirects the request using the IAB API of a specific market.
OpenIAB does not implement the logic of In-App purchases, it only proxies calls to the necessary market.
The project works with all markets that support in-app purchases:
- Google play
- Amazon appstore
- Samsung Apps
- SK-Telecom T-Store
An example of working with all markets that currently support in-app purchases can be found here .
I think this library will help reduce the time to develop In-App purchases for each individual market. Moreover, there will be more and more of them further.
Summary
Despite the fact that there are not so many supported systems, the project is actively developing and is aimed at the overall benefit, because the market will benefit from standardization of these technologies.
Let's hope that major market players will pay attention to him and will cooperate with him for the benefit of universal Android happiness.
I wish the developers to achieve what was planned and so that it doesn’t work out that way .
Good luck