How to detect if an android app is a game?

Question

In an app I am developing I need to iterate through the installed apps and detect which ones are games. Is there any way to do this?

I was thinking to a Play Store

Answer 1

There is no automatical way to detect if an app is a game. You just could compaire the package name of the common part of the package name. My solution was to index the google store pages and hash the package names.

I could optimize my hashes by building common prefixes. I handled the package name as a domain and grep the public suffix. I use the list from http://publicsuffix.org/.

A "public suffix" is one under which Internet users can directly register names. Some examples of public suffixes are .com, .co.uk and pvt.k12.ma.us. The Public Suffix List is a list of all known public suffixes.

The Public Suffix List is an initiative of Mozilla, but is maintained as a community resource. It is available for use in any software, but was originally created to meet the needs of browser manufacturers.

With this list you can detect part of a packagename is a common prefix.