How to programmatically detect whether WP8 GDR3 is installed?

Windows Phone 8 Update 3 (aka. GDR 3) preview already released for developers to build and test their applications and games. There are few features in this release that you might want to add in your app. For this, you need to check whether the device already has GDR3 installed.

In this small post, we are going to discuss how you can check whether the Updated 3 (GDR 3) has already been installed in the user’s device.

Windows Phone 8 GDR 3 has it’s OS version number starting from 8.0.10492. If you are a developer and targeting your apps to use one of it’s functionalities as an additional feature, you have to check whether the user already has the GDR 3 version of the OS installed.

To know whether the device has Update 3, just compare the current OS version with 8.0.10492. Here is a simple implementation of the method that you can use in your app or game:

public static bool SupportsWindowsPhone8GDR3()
{
    return Environment.OSVersion.Version >= new Version(8, 0, 10492);
}

I hope, this will now help you to identify the presence of GDR 3 (Update 3) of the Windows Phone 8 device. If you are a Windows Phone app/game developer and did not yet updated your test device, here is the post which will help you to download the Windows Phone 8 GDR 3.