Is it possible to force a windows phone to update your app?

Question

Say you have an app that uses an external system, like azure, and a major update makes breaking changes to the external system.

The old version of the app would fail, so...

Can you force the app to update?
If so, any help/links/tutorials would be helpful.

Answer 1

It is possible to programatically check from you app, if there is an update. See https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/21672.now-check-for-updates-of-your-app-inside-your-windows-phone-application.aspx.

If there is an update, just show the user sa message about the need for an update and redirect them to the store, disallowing im the usage of the outdated app.

Answer 2

I don't think so. You can use one of the application endpoints (Web services / JSON data sources, ...) to return an error to your app so the user is informed that un update is required.

For next releases plan a system to detect client version some how so it is easy to deprecate versions or simply handle multiple versions.