Identify Store App Type - windows-phone-8

From Microsoft Store if we select an app to install, how to identify whether the app is built on win 8/8.1/10?
Like how to know from seeing the app in store whether it is a metro app or UWP app?

Related

Get app purchase date for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 applications

Is there a way, either in C# or C++ APIs for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Metro applications, to get the user's app purchase date or, in case the app has been downloaded for free, the date of the first download? I'm specifically talking about the application's purchase date, not IAPs.
Thank you in advance.
There's few options:
1) Check out Windows.ApplicationModel.Package -class. It's available for 8.1 Store apps and provides information like InstalledDate. Word of warning, some of the properties only work in desktop apps.
2) You should be able to get the app's receipt. Receipt contains PurchaseDate for the product.
3) Manual way: When the app launches for the first time, create a roaming setting / app data where you store the launch date.

What happens when you update an Windows store app?

What happens when a developer updates an app? Does the user that updates the said app download a whole new app or is the windows app store smart enough like play store to just download the changes?Can anyone give logical explanation how it works in windows store?
>>Does the user that updates the said app download a whole new app or is the windows app store smart enough like play store to just download the changes?
When the developers created package for their project, and chose generate app bundle always, the user can download faster with an app bundle, because they only download the assets that they need. Then they don’t need to download a whole new app to update. If the developers didn’t choose this, the user may need to download a whole new app.
>>Can anyone give logical explanation how it works in windows store?
For example, if you create a app, then you choose generate app bundle always when packaging your app and publish this in the Windows Store. The customer need to download 100MB to require this app. After a period of time, you update this app, the customer just download the assets that they need to update our app, maybe just download 10MB.

Launch a Windows Phone app with android AAR (NFC)

I have a device with a hard-coded NFC tag that opens an Android app based on an Android Application Record (AAR). Basically it calls an Android app to open with type android.com:pkg and payload com.something.Something.
I have researched on how to launch my Windows Phone app with that existing tag, but in the end I have only found that Windows Phone can launch an app if the NFC tag is adequately programmed to open the Windows Phone app ID or the custom protocol registered in my app. But it is very important that I use the existing NFC tag which opens the Android app ID.
What is curious is that my Windows 10 Mobile detects this existing NFC tag to want to open the app when I touch it with my phone and prompts me if I want to launch an app? But the app with that ID isn't installed so I did a research on how to put this app ID on my Windows Phone app but in the end I only got deployment errors.
Android Application Records (AAR) cannot be used to launch Windows apps. Windows uses a different system to launch apps (Launch Record). The main probem is that Windows uses a different scheme to identify apps (not a Java package name as Android does). Moreover, Windows apps cannot be set to be automatically launched based on the data contained in an AAR, hence, it's not possible to build some custom filter that starts your Windows app based on that AAR.
The workaround that's currently known seems to be what's discussed in Cross platform launch records with extra data on Windows Phone and Android. Though this requires modification of the data structures on the tag side.

Windows phone calendar integration

We are building a simple we app that contains basic tasking functionality (tasks, appointments, etc.).
We want to integrate it with Windows Phone 8 native Calendar, without writing any apps but by making a some sort of webservice that could be added as an account to Windows phone (e.g. Facebook, Microsoft Live, Gmail - are all accounts that are added, thus the tasks are synced).
Yet what have I came up with was this:
Interacting with calendars (Live Connect API)
This looks like a way to actively push and control the items on the Microsoft Live account, which would be fine but it requires that account to make it happen and an active module to do all the management.
We are looking forward to mimicking account behaviour and letting the phone do all the work :)
CalDAV was another keyword that popped up while searching but to my understanding windows phone doesn't support it.
Is it possible to forcefeed windows phone calendar objects to the phone without making a custom app?
Windows phone 8.1 supports cardav/caldav. You can put a custom dav server address selecting icloud account (it is a workaround) and editing the dav url. So you can set up a dav server in your app and synch calendars and contacts between your web app and the wp8 defaukt calendars and contacts app.

Programmatically communicate with Windows 8 Music Player

I would like to know if it is possible to programmatically communicate with the default Windows 8 Music Player (Windows store app).
For example, when is it start/finish playing a new song, what is the name of the song etc.
I vaguely have an impression that WinRT app are based on COM/DCOM, so I suspect there maybe a way to expose that to be consume by external program. Is my assumption correct?
Windows store apps are "sandboxed" apps. You can't communicate with other WinRT apps. So you can't access what's being played in Music app of Windows 8 app.
The only way a windows app can communicate with it's host environment is through what is called Activation Protocol which basically opens another app. So metro media players can't provide info about what they are doing to other apps.
Also a metro app can ask a file to be opened by default handler of host system.
So the answer is no. There can't be a way for the media player to inform other apps about it's status.
Windows metro Apps are more similar to a Silverlight app than a COM/DCOM component.