How to get the handles of all open App Designer ap

Question

As mentioned in a related answer, it is possible to get the handles of all open figures using:

hFigs = findall(groot, 'Type', 'figure');

but this results in a list that contains both "old" figure and "new" uifigure handles.

How can I separate hFigs into two lists, one containing only figure and the other only uifigure references?

Answer 1

To distinguish between figure and uifigure objects programatically, we can use a slight adaptation of what I suggested here:

function tf = isUIFigure(hFigList)
  tf = arrayfun(@(x)isstruct(struct(x).ControllerInfo), hFigList);
end

It's advised to have a couple of warnings turned off before calling the above, e.g.

% Turn off warnings:
ws(2) = warning('query','MATLAB:structOnObject');
ws(1) = warning('query','MATLAB:HandleGraphics:ObsoletedProperty:JavaFrame');
for indW = 1:numel(ws)
  warning('off', ws(indW).identifier);
end
% Call function:
tf = isUIFigure(hFigs);
% Restore the warnings' state:
warning(ws);

and to conclude:

hFigs = findall(groot, 'Type', 'figure');
isUIF = isUIFigure(hFigs);
hNewFigs = hFigs(isUIF);
hOldFigs = hFigs(~isUIF);

This solution was tested on R2017a and R2017b.