I'm writing an App for Android which gets a list of all installed Apps and their details. I get most of what I need with:
context.getPackageManager().getInstalledPackages(0);
What I can't seem to figure out is where I can get the name or id of the vendor who created the package/App.
Any suggestions?
I don't think there is any way to programmatically access that information. In fact I don't think the name of the vendor is stored within the apk file anywhere. The name that shows up as "Developer" in the Market is the name associated with the google account that uploaded the application. I think this value is stored by the Market infrastructure, rather than the application itself. Unfortunately there are currently no public APIs that grant access to the Market data.
If you are not necessarily concerned with the actual human readable name and you just aim to be able to programmatically tell whether the device has multiple applications from the same developer you might be able to glean this from the signature field inside the PackageInfo object that you can get from pm.getPackageInfo(String packageName, int flags); I have very little experience with this though, I could be incorrect.