Question

We have an application, that can itself be downloaded for free, but works with paid, licensed data. Some users buy particular version of the data while others buy right to use latest data for some period of time. Now as the application evolves, it eventually stops supporting data older than some date. So obviously users who have those data licensed, but no license for newer data don’t want to upgrade. But if we publish new version on the market, they would see it and if they upgrade, they will have trouble downgrading back to version that actually works for them.

So can we somehow instruct the market application not to offer upgrades for particular user or some hack to achieve that end?

We currently use mechanism completely independent on the market to sell and check licenses for the data, but could consider different mechanism (like the android in-app billing support or something) if it could help solving the problem.

Answer 1

I came up with an option that market will contain an installer that will download and install another .apk containing the core of the application locally.

We already have an installer dialog in the application for downloading the data and user has to enter it when using the application for the first time, so it can be made responsible for the application core too.