Sideloaded Android Apps Don't Update Themselves. I Fixed That.
When you install an Android app from an APK, outside the Play Store, it never updates itself. The Play Store won’t touch it, the OS won’t check for new versions, and your users stay on whatever they installed until somebody tells them otherwise. I maintain a small app that’s distributed as a direct APK download. Every release meant messaging people to go and download it again. That stops being viable at about three users, so I built a basic over-the-air updater into the app. ...