For instance, Hangout allows you (on an old phone) to uninstall the updates to downgrade it to GTalk.
Can I allow the user to do so with my app? I mean, I will push an update on the store, will we be able to uninstall this update and restore to the previous version?
No, you cannot. What you're describing only works in situations where the downgrade is resident in the device's /system partition (meaning it was pre-installed when the device firmware was built). Unless you're building your own ROM with the application resident, the old version won't be there to downgrade to.
Note that when building ROMs there are two ways to provide applications -- one by simply placing the APK into the right directory in /system, and the other by placing it somewhere that some other code locates and performs a pm install on. The downgrade feature is only possible when the APK has simply been placed where it needs to be with no pm install required.
As far as my understanding goes in the case of Hangouts/GTalk: GTalk is most likely installed as a system app, Hangouts is an update to GTalk which also renames the application. As with every application installed as a system app and updated via Google Play, the user may decide to remove the update (same as uninstalling any non-system app), thus restoring the factory-version of that app.
When updating an application which was previously installed via Google Play, the old version does not remain in the system. Therefore, I doubt that restoring an old version is possible when using Google Play to distribute your app.
If you really want your users to be able to go back to previous version, you should consider hosting older versions of your app on some sort of web server / dropbox / ftp / etc. Users may then grab those files and do a manual downgrade.
For instance, Hangout allows you (on an old phone) to uninstall the updates to downgrade it to GTalk.
Can I allow the user to do so with my app? I mean, I will push an update on the store, will we be able to uninstall this update and restore to the previous version?
No, you cannot. What you're describing only works in situations where the downgrade is resident in the device's /system partition (meaning it was pre-installed when the device firmware was built). Unless you're building your own ROM with the application resident, the old version won't be there to downgrade to.
Note that when building ROMs there are two ways to provide applications -- one by simply placing the APK into the right directory in /system, and the other by placing it somewhere that some other code locates and performs a pm install on. The downgrade feature is only possible when the APK has simply been placed where it needs to be with no pm install required.
As far as my understanding goes in the case of Hangouts/GTalk: GTalk is most likely installed as a system app, Hangouts is an update to GTalk which also renames the application. As with every application installed as a system app and updated via Google Play, the user may decide to remove the update (same as uninstalling any non-system app), thus restoring the factory-version of that app.
When updating an application which was previously installed via Google Play, the old version does not remain in the system. Therefore, I doubt that restoring an old version is possible when using Google Play to distribute your app.
If you really want your users to be able to go back to previous version, you should consider hosting older versions of your app on some sort of web server / dropbox / ftp / etc. Users may then grab those files and do a manual downgrade.
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