Launch service on home button press - android

Android M:
I am trying create/resume a service whenever the home button is pressed. The activity that is displayed when the home button is pressed should not be destroyed/paused. I have tried to make my service filter the android.intent.category.HOME intent but android does not seem to recognize this as a launcher. Is there any workaround to solve this problem?

I am trying create/resume a service whenever the home button is pressed.
Implement a home screen. Convince users to use your home screen. Tie your service into your home screen implementation.
The activity that is displayed when the home button is pressed should not be destroyed/paused
The activity that is displayed will be paused, because the HOME button always brings another activity to the foreground. The only exception is if the home screen is already in the foreground. There is nothing that you can do about this, other than write your own mobile OS.
The activity that is displayed will be destroyed if and when Android decides to terminate the process associated with that activity. You do not get a vote.
I have tried to make my service filter the android.intent.category.HOME intent but android does not seem to recognize this as a launcher.
That is because the HOME button will start an activity, not a service.
So there is no way of implementing your own launcher that does not open the Home screen?
You are welcome to implement your own customized version of Android that offers this. Then, you can put that version of Android in your own custom ROM, then convince people to use that ROM.

Related

History stack cleared when clicking on recent apps button

I'm working on a launcher app that basically launches other installed apps on the device with an explicit intent and I have a edge case scenario:
An Activity (Act) creates an intent of an application (App) and starts it by calling startActivity(intent).
App get launched, my Activity going to "stop" state.
After a while I want to get back to my application so I click on "back" hard button that closes App and bring my Application to foreground (resume state).
This is the wanted behaviour.
Here is the edge case:
If I click on the "recent applications" hard button (square icon) while on App is launched, history stack is lost, and when I return to App, and click on "back" hard button - App exists to the Launcher screen and onResume of my application is being called.
I searched the web for a solution for couple of hours now, maybe I'll find a solution here.
Thanks
It seems to me you should set android:alwaysRetainTaskState true in your root activity.

Android studio App home button and re open

Android studio home button problem.
I have so many activities, when I press home buttom in any activities.
Then if I restart my app.
it started from splash activity(logo activity).
However, I want to start this from activity where I pressed home button.
Can anybody figure this out?
By default, Android handles this behavior. When you press the home button, the app should go to background and at the next time when you open it, it should start from where you left off. But, Android's memory management is designed to automatically terminate minimized apps that have not been accessed in a while when memory is needed for newly launched apps.
If there is enough memory available and still your app gets terminated, that means you are not using the API's correctly. Please read this [article] to know how to handle onPause() and onResume() to achieve this behavior.

Back button from my app goes to home screen rather than previous app

I'm trying to debug an issue and I'm not sure what is going on.
My application is launched from application A (this is not mine, someone else's, so I don't have any source code)
When I click the back button on my application, I land on the Android home screen rather than going to the application that launch me. I checked all the flags in the intent that I receive, and everything is turned off.
Now if I launch my application from any other application, then pressing the back button goes back to the application that launch me.
I'm not sure how to debug this issue. Any ideas?
Application A might call finish() once the Intent is sent to start your Activity. Then the Activity in application A that started the Intent to launch your Activity will go through onDestroy() and will be removed from the backstack, so when you press the back key you will go to the home screen if the Activity in Application A was the first Activity launched by Application A

Home screen component name

I am developing simple home screen application. So when i press home button i can
choose between native and mine home screen app. The problem is: if i set my app as default
home screen application when i restart phone i can't enter native home screen app
because it has never started so my app stands on top off stack. How can i enter
native home screen app when i restart phone if mine is default home screen app?
I have idea:
On boot, i can check the calling intent - if it contains the Home category, i will call native home screen app. Something like this:
Intent creatingIntent = getIntent();
if (creatingIntent.hasCategory(Intent.CATEGORY_HOME))
{
creatingIntent.setPackage("com.android.launcher");
creatingIntent.setComponent(new ComponentName
("com.android.launcher",
"com.android.launcher2.Launcher"));
startActivity(creatingIntent);
finish();
}
But the problem is i don't know how can i get Component name for native home screen application, can someone help?
The goal of an home app (=launcher) is to replace the native launcher, it's weird to force the cohabitation of 2 launchers. But if you success to do something like that, when you press on the home button it will launch also the Native launcher.
To answer your question, the native launcher depends of the target device. Example : samsung doesn't use the same launcher than google, so components name will be different.
Have you tried to do a broadcast receiver which launch your app at start up ? With that, you don't have to put your apps as default home app, so you conserve the choice when you press on the Home button. However, it's not a solution if a user choose your app as default app.
Maybe you can look here How to use customized screen instead of default start screen in Android?

what exactly android's home button doing?

What I do know is that the current activity get into the onPause() mode, and the home screen activity brought to front.
My confusion starts with situation you can re-open the application from the recent tasks menu.
so what exactly happening when I'm opening the application from the recent tasks manager?
Is the activity that was foreground when the home button pressed is still somewhere in the stack?
Is there more then one activity stack on the same time?
As far as I understand it, there is no real stack (of applications). Is just that your activity has states, so whenever you are pressing the HOME button your activity in your current application just "pauses" like if it was a stand-by state so multiple applications can be in this state as long as the system doesnt require memory and kill the tasks.
So whenever you open the activity from the recent tasks its just telling the application to wake up.
First of all, here is everything you need to know about the concept of the "Up Button":
Navigation with Back and Up and some of the implementation details: Providing Ancestral and Temporal Navigation.
Generally speaking, the Up button lets you navigate up in the application hierarchy, instead of just navigating back in the application(s) back-stack.
For example, if you work with some kind of app and you get the email notification, you can open the mail client by pressing the notification. Then you can go back to you application you were working with by pressing the Back button ( back-stack ) or you can press the Up button in order to go to the mail client's 'parent' activity ( for example from some EmailMessageActivity to EmailHomeActivity ) to work with the mail client application instead of the initial application ( the back-stack usually is cleared then, so you can only go back with the Back button as far as the the Android Home screen ).
The "Recent Tasks" factor is irrelevant and misleading, it's just another way of starting a new Activity.

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