How to get Category for each App on device on Android?

Question

I've got an Android app which scans for all Apps installed on the device and then reports this to a server (it's an MDM agent). Any suggestions on how to get the Category of the App? Everyone has a different list of Categories, but basically something like Game, Entertainment, Tools/Utilities, etc.

From what I can tell there is nothing related to Category stored on the device itself. I was thinking of using the android market API to search for the application in the market and use the Category value returned by the search. Not sure how successful this will be finding a match. Any suggestions on how best to do this?

Any suggestions on a different approach?

Thanks in advance. mike

Answer 1

I know that this is an old post, but for anyone still looking for this, API level 26 (O) has added categories to android.content.pm.ApplicationInfo.

From the docs https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/ApplicationInfo#category:

public int category

The category of this app. Categories are used to cluster multiple apps together into meaningful groups, such as when summarizing battery, network, or disk usage. Apps should only define this value when they fit well into one of the specific categories.

Set from the R.attr.appCategory attribute in the manifest. If the manifest doesn't define a category, this value may have been provided by the installer via PackageManager#setApplicationCategoryHint(String, int). Value is CATEGORY_UNDEFINED, CATEGORY_GAME, CATEGORY_AUDIO, CATEGORY_VIDEO, CATEGORY_IMAGE, CATEGORY_SOCIAL, CATEGORY_NEWS, CATEGORY_MAPS, or CATEGORY_PRODUCTIVITY

One can now do something like:

PackageManager pm = context.getPackageManager();
ApplicationInfo applicationInfo = pm.getApplicationInfo(packageName, 0);
if (android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= android.os.Build.VERSION_CODES.O) {
    int appCategory = applicationInfo.category;
    String categoryTitle = (String) ApplicationInfo.getCategoryTitle(context, appCategory)
    // ...
}

Answer 2

if you get for each application its package name, you could ask directly to play store which category an app belongs, parsing html response page with this library:

org.jsoup.jsoup1.8.3

Here's a snippet to solve your problem:

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

public final static String GOOGLE_URL = "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=";
public static final String ERROR = "error";

...


   private class FetchCategoryTask extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, Void> {

       private final String TAG = FetchCategoryTask.class.getSimpleName();
       private PackageManager pm;
       private ActivityUtil mActivityUtil;

       @Override
       protected Void doInBackground(Void... errors) {
          String category;
           pm = getPackageManager();
           List<ApplicationInfo> packages = pm.getInstalledApplications(PackageManager.GET_META_DATA);
           Iterator<ApplicationInfo> iterator = packages.iterator();
           while (iterator.hasNext()) {
               ApplicationInfo packageInfo = iterator.next();
               String query_url = GOOGLE_URL + packageInfo.packageName;
               Log.i(TAG, query_url);
               category = getCategory(query_url);
               // store category or do something else
           }
           return null;
        }


        private String getCategory(String query_url) {
           boolean network = mActivityUtil.isNetworkAvailable();
           if (!network) {
               //manage connectivity lost
               return ERROR;
           } else {
               try {
                   Document doc = Jsoup.connect(query_url).get();
                   Element link = doc.select("span[itemprop=genre]").first();
                   return link.text();
               } catch (Exception e) {
                   return ERROR;
               }
           }
        }
    }  
}

You could make these queries in an AsyncTask, or in a service. Hope that you find it helpful.