Devendra's SEO Diary: What is the Package Name in Android Application ?

Saturday, May 23, 2020

What is the Package Name in Android Application ?

All Android apps have a package name. The package name uniquely identifies the app on the device; it is also unique in the Google Play store. This means that once you have published an app with this package name, you can never change it; doing so would cause your app to be treated as a brand new app, and existing users of your app will not see the newly packaged app as an update.

Ref: http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/applicationid-vs-packagename

KEY NOTE:

A mobile app does not need a domain name registration.
When you start developing the Android app using either Android Studio or Eclipse, then in the very first package name is assigned and once you done, generate the APk and upload it to google play store then you get a unique package name according to your app name.
So, you don't need to buy / register a domain name to distribute your app. The domain name is used by Android Studio to generate a package name. Your package name is just a unique identifier for your application in the Google Play Store. It can be anything you want as long as it is unique. Generally, we use reverse domain names like com.xyz. or org.xyz.
Package names are written in all lower case to avoid conflict with the names of classes or interfaces.
The package name is, strictly speaking, the application ID. It looks like a traditional Java package name but it is used to uniquely identifies your app on the device and in Google Play Store. You must have unique package name for an android app. Because every app on play-store have unique package name.
Generally, the package name of an app is in the format domain.company.application, but it’s completely up to the app’s developer to choose the name. The domain portion is the domain extension, like com or org, used by the developer of the app. The company portion is usually the name of the developer’s company or product. The final application portion usually describes the app itself. This could be one word or multiple words separated by periods. For Example: com.xyz.manufacturer
Companies can use their reversed Web domain name to begin their package names. For example, com.xyz.mypackage for a package named mypackage created by a programmer at xyz.com.
Every Android app has a unique application ID that looks like a Java package name, such as com.xyz.myapp. This ID uniquely identifies your app on the device and in Google Play Store. If you want to upload a new version of your app, the application ID (and the certificate you sign it with) must be the same as the original APK— if you change the application ID, Google Play Store treats the APK as a completely different app. So once you publish your app, you should never change the application ID.
As mentioned, the package name is unique to an application. Play Store and Android smartphones identify apps using the package name. Two different apps can have the same name, however, their package name or application ID will always be different.
Android apps use package name as their unique identification. In some references, it may also be called Application ID. Although there are some differences between the two, for most of us non-developers, it is the same. It usually consists of 3 parts, but it can have 2 parts as well. For example, the package ID of Mozilla’s Firefox Browser for Android is org.mozilla.firefox.