Auto-update of an Android app never happens

Question

I have a somewhat unusual Android app in the Play Store that's running on dedicated devices 24/7 (it collects sensor data, it's not meant to run on phones used for anything else). I would like the app to auto-update without user interaction, but that never seems to happen. Why could this be?

Some more background:

• Auto-update is explicitly turned on for the app on the devices.
• Other apps do seem to auto-update.
• The app stops and restarts itself every 12 hours; mostly to whack the app out of any weird state it might get into and clear memory, but I was also hoping this would give it a chance to auto-update. There is a 10 second delay until the app restarts.
• The devices are mostly old phones (HTC Desire C) running Android 4.0.4

This is fairly hard and time-consuming to test so any experiences shared with similar requirements could be helpful.

Answer 1

Make sure the port 5228, TCP and UDP, is not blocked by a firewall per https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2651367?hl=en

We've had a similar problem for years. Our apps run on school deployed devices. Whenever we push an update, it reaches may be 10% of devices within 24 hours, the rest seem to "hang". It takes about a week for another 30% of devices to get the update, while the remaining %60 never get it. There is no difference in settings across devices. All set to auto-update of course.

The way we "solved it" is our app is checking if the market has a newer version (there are libraries for doing it, but we have own server responding yes/no). If there is a newer version of the app, we invoke the intent to open Google Play with the app's page. The user has to manually click "Update" at that point.

If there was a native or cleaner way to push the updates we'd love to hear, even at this point in the game. Bothering users to update is not ideal.