android - Publishing same app with different names in the Play store

Question

I know it is technically possible to put the same application into the app store with 2 almost identical APKs (different package names and titles), although probably a bit dodgy - I imagine this would not be allowed by Google, but I don't see anything in their Ts & Cs that prohibit this

https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreement.html

E.g. "My cool app free" And "The awesomest app trial"

Question: Is this allowed?

Reason: A colleague and I were debating the effect of titles and descriptions of downloads (based on different indexes/user searches) and wondering if people ever post a game/app with 2 different ones to see which is more successful

Answer 1

You can if the package name of the app is different, as you said. This is done quite often for apps with trial and paid version. Regarding your question, we have right now around 6 apps in Google Play which are different branded versions of the same app. This means, they have their own package name, splash screen, and some database data, but the app is really the same. So far we didn't get any trouble with Google, so I would say it's possible.

Just for reference, in case you are interested in doing something similar, the best option in terms of maintainability of your app, consists in using an Android library project.

Basically you have one main big project with the "Android Library" option checked in Eclipse. You have all the main code there. On the other hand, you create two additional projects linked to your library. They will just need their manifest.xml and some activity to call the main activity of the library. Their package names must be different if you want to publish both apps in Google Play.

Additionally, you can override some resources for every project. For instance, you could have a boolean in /res/values indicating whether the project is a trial or paid version, with different values for them. Then, in the library you could check this boolean to show advertisements if it's a trial version. Another useful thing you can do is using a custom splash screen for every app, by having different image resources in every project with the same name.