How to track installations of an APK file?

Question

Android

Hello!
Dear experts, please share your experience on how to implement install tracking (with postback) in an apk application that is not published on the Google Play Market?
Those. when downloading an apk file, the click identifier must somehow be transferred to it, and then after the user opens this apk file, the application must send a get request to a certain url with the transfer of this click identifier.

Answer 1

I saw somewhere, for each user, on the fly, generate your own apk file, with the only difference being the changing identifier in the resource files. If you do not need to sign the file, with due red-eye, the file can be edited directly in apk directly (if you turn off zip compression, it's easy).

Answer 2

Option 1:
Monitor the download of the apk package on the source site.
Pros:
+ you always know how many people have downloaded your app
Cons:
- you can cheat downloads
- if you re-upload to the mirror, you will lose full statistics
- you won’t know how many installs there were after downloading
Option 2:
Send a request to your server when you first launch the app
Pros:
+ you always know when, who and from what device launched the application for the first time
+ the source site for downloading the package does not play a role
Cons:
- if you need to monitor the source site, you will have to generate your own id for each and pack it into the application, this is the worst crutch approach from a technical point of view. In addition, it will require a lot of preliminary organizational fuss
- you won’t be able to find out who and when downloaded and installed the application, but never launched it