Android DownloadManager and SSL (https)

Question

Oh, great. There's always something else that some... Grrr...

Anyway, so I worked days and days wading through vague, incomplete, and contradictory Picasa information so that my Android app could find a Picasa picture and download it using the download manager. So just now I made the finishing touches and hit the "run" button. Everything went fine until DownloadManager tried to download the file:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Can only download HTTP URIs: https://example.com/image.jpg

Tell me you're joking. Tell me they didn't make a download manager that can't handle SSL...

Better yet, tell me how to turn on SSL access in the Android download manager.

Answer 1

I had the same problem previously. Yup I see HTTPS support is already in ICS, but not in 2.3.7 and below, but we can extract the source code to create a DownloadManager to support that.

Based on the sample code from http://android-er.blogspot.com/2011/07/sample-code-using-androidappdownloadman.html i made a demo with extracted DownloadManager to support HTTPS.

You can find the sample code here https://github.com/alvinsj/android-https-downloadmanager-demo, run by just changing the url to your https based url.

Answer 2

Yes it seems that DownloadManager only supports HTTP protocol: http://www.google.com/codesearch#cZwlSNS7aEw/frameworks/base/core/java/android/app/DownloadManager.java&exact_package=android&q=Can%20only%20download%20HTTP%20URIs&type=cs&l=343

I'm disappointed too as I just wanted to use it on a HTTPS site.

Answer 3

I've found a very easy solution for this:

request = new DownloadManager.Request(sourceUrl.replace("https://", "http://"))

Surprisingly worked for all https URLs that I tried. I'm not sure about the https security, but there is no exception and file gets downloaded properly.