Launch custom android application from android bro

Question

Can anybody please guide me regarding how to launch my android application from the android browser?

Answer 1

Xamarin port of Felix's answer

In your MainActivity, add this (docs: Android.App.IntentFilterAttribute Class):

....
[IntentFilter(new[] { 
    Intent.ActionView }, 
    Categories = new[] { Intent.CategoryDefault, Intent.CategoryBrowsable }, 
    DataScheme = "my.special.scheme")
]
public class MainActivity : Activity
{
    ....

Xamarin will add following in the AndroidManifest.xml for you:

<activity android:label="Something" android:screenOrientation="portrait" android:theme="@style/MyTheme" android:name="blahblahblah.MainActivity">
  <intent-filter>
    <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
    <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
    <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
    <data android:scheme="my.special.scheme" />
  </intent-filter>
</activity>

And in order to get params (I tested in OnCreate of MainActivity):

var data = Intent.Data;
if (data != null)
{
    var scheme = data.Scheme;
    var host = data.Host;
    var args = data.PathSegments;

    if (args.Count > 0)
    {
        var first = args[0];
        var second = args[1];
        ...
    }
}

As far as I know, above can be added in any activity, not only MainActivity

Answer 2

Please note if your icon is disappear from android launcher when you implement this feature, than you have to split intent-filter.

    <activity
        android:name=".MainActivity"
        android:label="@string/app_name" >
        <intent-filter>
            <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
        </intent-filter>
        <intent-filter>
            <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
            <data android:scheme="your-own-uri" />
        </intent-filter>
    </activity>

Answer 3

Use an <intent-filter> with a <data> element. For example, to handle all links to twitter.com, you'd put this inside your <activity> in your AndroidManifest.xml:

<intent-filter>
    <data android:scheme="http" android:host="twitter.com"/>
    <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
</intent-filter>

Then, when the user clicks on a link to twitter in the browser, they will be asked what application to use in order to complete the action: the browser or your application.

Of course, if you want to provide tight integration between your website and your app, you can define your own scheme:

<intent-filter>
    <data android:scheme="my.special.scheme" />
    <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
</intent-filter>

Then, in your web app you can put links like:

<a href="my.special.scheme://other/parameters/here">

And when the user clicks it, your app will be launched automatically (because it will probably be the only one that can handle my.special.scheme:// type of uris). The only downside to this is that if the user doesn't have the app installed, they'll get a nasty error. And I'm not sure there's any way to check.

---

Edit: To answer your question, you can use getIntent().getData() which returns a Uri object. You can then use Uri.* methods to extract the data you need. For example, let's say the user clicked on a link to http://twitter.com/status/1234:

Uri data = getIntent().getData();
String scheme = data.getScheme(); // "http"
String host = data.getHost(); // "twitter.com"
List<String> params = data.getPathSegments();
String first = params.get(0); // "status"
String second = params.get(1); // "1234"

You can do the above anywhere in your Activity, but you're probably going to want to do it in onCreate(). You can also use params.size() to get the number of path segments in the Uri. Look to javadoc or the android developer website for other Uri methods you can use to extract specific parts.

Answer 4

Look @JRuns answer in here. The idea is to create html with your custom scheme and upload it somewhere. Then if you click on your custom link on your html-file, you will be redirected to your app. I used this article for android. But dont forget to set full name Name = "MyApp.Mobile.Droid.MainActivity" attribute to your target activity.

Answer 5

In my case I had to set two categories for the <intent-filter> and then it worked:

<intent-filter>
<data android:scheme="my.special.scheme" />
<action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"/>
<category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE"/>
</intent-filter>

Answer 6

All above answers didn't work for me with CHROME as of 28 Jan 2014

my App launched properly from http://example.com/someresource/ links from apps like hangouts, gmail etc but not from within chrome browser.

to solve this, so that it launches properly from CHROME you have to set intent filter like this

        <intent-filter>
            <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />

            <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />

            <data
                android:host="example.com"
                android:pathPrefix="/someresource/"
                android:scheme="http" />
            <data
                android:host="www.example.com"
                android:pathPrefix="/someresource/"
                android:scheme="http" />
        </intent-filter>

note the pathPrefix element

your app will now appear inside activity picker whenever user requests http://example.com/someresource/ pattern from chrome browser by clicking a link from google search results or any other website