Can You Change Your App Name (this Under Icon In List Of Application) Dynamically?

I am wondering which name will be better for my app. I am thinking about experiment, which will change name of application (in 10% downloaded apps). Later I could check statistics

Solution 1:

No. The app name is specified in your manifest so it will be static. You could change the name in the titlebar of the app though.

Picking a good name is key.

Solution 2:

depending on exactly what you want you have a few options. You can call

this.setTitle("New Title Here");

from an Activity and this will change the title that appears at the top of the screen just beneath the notification bar. If you are trying to change the title that appears in the launcher, or on the home screen under the icon I don't think you can do this programmatically. You'd have to create two seperate versions of your application and use the different values for < application android:label> inside your manifest for each of them. Or maybe you could create another values folder like values-hdpi if the values folder works the same as the layout and drawable folders (which I suspect it does, but I've never tested.) then it would pull the value from the Strings.xml file inside the hdpi folder if the device has high density display, so you could get a different name for those devices. Maybe using this method you could use a language modifier like values-esp and somehow force the app to go into 'spanish mode' for a certain subset of users so that it pulls this alternate value.

Solution 3:

If I understand your question correctly, you want to know if it's possible to test different names on the Android Market, correct?

The only way to do this with the Google Market is to have two separate copies of your app, but using different package names for each. The name that appears in the Market is set on the Developer Console, and while it can be changed, you will not see two different entries for your app in the market.

This is because the market uses your package name to identify your app, not the app name that you supply.

So, while it's easy to change the display name of the app while it is running by using setTitle as @Tim and @Robby have said, this only changes the app title while it is running - it does not affect the name used in the Android package manager, and it also does not affect the name displayed in the Market.

As I say above, if you are wanting to test which name is more popular and therefore results in more downloads, you will need to have multiple apps on the market with different package names. You will also then have to consider how to handle upgrades, and if one name turns out to be very popular, I don't think there's any facility to "upgrade" the other users to your new package name since they are different packages and therefore there is no upgrade path. This means you'll either have to inconvenience users of the old name by somehow asking them to switch to the new app name, or maintain all named versions of your app for the expected lifetime of it.

If you do get your users to switch to the new app, you will then also have to consider how to migrate their data. This can be done (3G watchdog does it when you upgrade from the lite version to pro), but it's an extra layer of complexity that you can avoid.