Play Install Referrer Library

Question

Hello Google Play Developer,

We recently announced that we’ll be deprecating the install_referrer intent broadcast mechanism. Because one or more of your apps uses this intent to track referrals, we wanted to ensure you make the switch before March 1, 2020. After this date, new versions of the Play Store app will no longer broadcast the install_referrer intent after app installs.

Action required

Migrate to the Play Install Referrer API to track your app installs for the following apps and/or games.

• I recently got this email from Google.
• I am using Firebase Analytics and Crash reports in my android application to track the application behavior.
• Developer documents mostly highlights the applications that are using the Ad-Services which is not used in my application.

Any solution regarding this would be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you are using firebase-core SDK for Firebase Analytics then remove it & exclue play-services measurement sdk.

As per Firebase SDK release notes:

No longer add the Android library com.google.firebase:firebase-core.
This SDK included the Firebase SDK for Google Analytics. 
Now, to use Analytics (or any of the Firebase products that require or recommend the use of Analytics), 
you need to explicitly add the Analytics dependency:

implementation ("com.google.firebase:firebase-analytics:17.2.1"){
    exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-measurement'
    exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-measurement-sdk'
    exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-measurement-impl'
}

This might solve your issue.

Answer 2

In my case, I found in my merged Manifest file usage of this source: "play-services-measurement:17.2.0", which includes permission BIND_GET_INSTALL_REFERRER_SERVICE, that was a cause of a problem. For fixing that, we can explicitly exclude deprecated modules, this fix works for me:

implementation ("com.google.firebase:firebase-core:17.2.0"){
    exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-measurement-api'
    exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-measurement'
    exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-measurement-sdk'
    exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-measurement-impl'
    exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-measurement-sdk-api'
    exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-measurement-base'
}

for testing you can check if permission BIND_GET_INSTALL_REFERRER_SERVICE still exists in your final merged Manifest file after gradle synchronization