Android auto installation

Question

We want to install our application on to (thousands of)phones and these phones will be later delivered to clients. Do we have to do this manually? Is there a faster way to do this?

For example, in Windows Mobile, if you put your installation files in a certain folder on SD card and when you insert that SD card to the phone the app is installed automatically to the device. Any similar mechanism on Android?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can create an update.zip file on an sdcard that will install an application, but you have to boot the phone into recovery mode to run it. I haven't used update.zip this way, but I saw it here: http://www.londatiga.net/it/how-to-create-android-update-zip-package/

Unfortunately it's much more complicated and slow than the old 2577\Autorun.exe method from WindowsMobile.

Other ideas...

• ADB + USB hubs: Hook up a bunch of the phones at the same time using USB hubs, run a script to find the device ids with adb devices and execute adb install your_app.apk for each one.
  (Requires taking the time to enable USB debugging on each device)

• Install from the web: Host the .apk publicly or locally. Now you have to pull up the URL on the phone.
  (Requires taking the time to checking that checkbox for installing from unknown sources on each device)

  • TinyUrl: host the .apk anywhere, shrink the URL, type it into the browser.

  • QR Code: If the devices happen to have a QR Code Reader like Google Goggles pre-installed, you could save yourself the typing of the URL.

  • SMS: If all of these phones have service and you have the numbers handy, you could broadcast an SMS to all of them.

Best of luck!