Open Gmail PendingIntent in background? - android

I am trying to open a PendingIntent that opens the Gmail App in the background through a notification.
The steps are as follows:
Show notification with action button
On click of action button (which has a PendingIntent), I want start the PendingIntent (which launches the Gmail app) but in the background.
Dismiss Notification
The notification remains the only thing that the user has seen (i.e. the UI has not changed but only the notification has itself been dismissed after clicking the action button).
It may be "hack-y" but I could also quickly open and then "minimize" the gmail app?
Any ideas?

OK, I really don't understand what you can achieve from such behavior.
you definitely could not provide any meaningful extra data on the intent (unless you are the developer of gmail, which I don't believe is the case..).
actually, if you provides intent to launch explicitly Gmail app (by specifying the package name) - your code would break if Gmail app package name would change.
now to your question:
it is possible to launch activity without bringing it to foreground:
all you have to do is add to the intent been held by the pending intent to flags: FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK and FLAG_ACTIVITY_MULTIPLE_TASK
FLAG_ACTIVITY_MULTIPLE_TASK flag is not recommended for use unless your application is the launcher.
gmail main activity would create in background new task, and that's it.
note that the gmail activity would not go threw the onResume and onStart callbacks (because it's not on foreground..) , so if any meaningful code happens from this callbacks - they won't be executed anyway..
UPDATE
now that I know that your purpose is to mark an emails as "read", I can tell you that any attempts to launch gmail app want do to you any good. as I mentioned, you can't pass extra meaningful data to gamil launching intent. there is simply no such API's, and launching main activity simply won't do anything that would help you.
instead, I'll suggest you to use Gmail API's for control user's inbox

Related

Where should I be using getIntent() in the Android lifecycle

I have a bug in my app which I thought I knew how to resolve, but now I've thought more about what is happening I'm not sure I do know the fix.
My app receives an incoming intent from a calling third party app as a string. That string can be sent as a SEND intent or a VIEW intent.
All of that works fine unless the app is already running...
This is what is happening:
My app is not running (not listed in the running apps view)
Share is clicked in another (third party) app and my app is selected to receive the shared text (text1).
My app opens and the text is displayed (and processed) as expected.
The user switches back to the third party app and shares some different text (text2) and my app is selected to receive this new text.
My app opens, but the original text (text1) is still displayed.
At this point I thought that the bug was because I am reading the intent in onCreate() and then displaying and processing it. My thinking was that as the app is already running onCreate() is not being called when the app is shown the second time as we jump into the lifecycle at onResume().
However, if I continue the test as follows:
Without exiting my app the user switches back to the third party app again and again shares the same piece of second text (text2) with my app.
My app is displayed again but this time correctly shows and processes the second text.
How can this be, as the app is still running, surely onCreate() is still not going to be called!
I thought that the fix was going to be simply to move the getIntent() call into onResume() (or onStart() ?) But now I'm not sure about this. Is this right thing to do?
The core of the issue is the fact that your Activity is already on top of the activity stack when the second Intent is being fired.
The launch mode will matter here.
What you can do is, set the launchMode to singleTop, and then get the intent in onNewIntent() method.
That is a good way of handling such scenarios. Please read the link above and it will make things very clear.

How i open my application as soon as I receive notification of that app

I would like to know how do I make an application that is running in the background open automatically when I have some event.
Android Manifest allows you to set up filters that act much like a listener to start an Activity. startActivity(intent); allows you to fire an event that starts the Activity. Not quite sure of specific way to do this in your code unless you share the code if packages are different you may need pending intent to get around permissions. Are you lanching Service or activity?

Is it safe to use Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_MULTIPLE_TASK?

Background
Let's take the next sceneraio:
the user uses an app X which has multiple activities (like the gmail app).
after navigating the app X a bit, he goes to your app.
in your app, you need to start this X app using an intent, to go to a specific activity within it.
now the user goes to this specific activity on the app X.
the user presses the back button, hoping to go back to your app instead of staying on the app X.
another similar scenario:
the user navigates on your app between activities.
your app went to the background (using the home button, for example).
your app shows a notification that once clicked, it will open a specific activity of your app.
the user clicks on the notification and goes to the specific activity of your app.
the user presses the back button, hoping to return to the app that was shown before clicking on the notification, instead of going to the previous activity on your app that was shown the last time it left it.
It seems that the last step on both scenarios isn't the default behavior.
This is why I've searched what is the best combination of flags for this purpose.
The problem
It seems that the only flag that can achieve the behavior i've described is Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_MULTIPLE_TASK (together with Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK).
According to the android API, however, this flag isn't recommended for normal use:
Do not use this flag unless you are implementing your own top-level
application launcher.
...
Because the default system does not include
graphical task management, you should not use this flag unless you
provide some way for a user to return back to the tasks you have
launched.
This information seems as confusing as the rest of the descriptions about intents.
There are other intents flags that I've seen, like Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TASK that achieve a similar result, but they have weird behaviors and/or they use high API
The question
Is it safe to use this flag? Are there any good alternatives to it?
What is the danger of using this flag and what is the meaning of the description on the API of using it?
In your first scenario, if your app needs to start an activity of another app, it can just start this activity within the same task as your application. There is no reason to use any special Intent flags for this (you don't need FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK or FLAG_ACTIVITY_MULTIPLE_TASK). In step 5 of your scenario, the user will return to your application (because BACK just takes him to the previous activity in the current task). This is the standard, default behaviour.
In your second scenario, my first response is "that isn't the standard behaviour". That means that users probably won't expect to be able to go back to the task that they were doing prior to clicking on the notification. However, if you really want to implement this, then I would suggest that you create a special Activity that is launched from the notification and this special Activity should have a different taskAffinity than the rest of the Activities in your application. In this case, when the special Activity is launched from the notification, it will not bring your application's task to the foreground. It will just create a new task containing just the special Activity. When the special Activity is showing, the user can press the BACK key and this will return him to the task that he was working on prior to clicking on your notification.
In general you should NOT use FLAG_ACTIVITY_MULTIPLE_TASK. The main reason is that if you have several tasks containing your application (or parts of it), it is pretty much impossible for the user to return to a specific one. There is no way to provide different launch icons or different application names (for the different tasks)(, so that the user will see multiple tasks in the "recent tasks" list, but will not be able to tell which one is which. You will have a hard time cleaning up what you are doing and you will just make more problems than you can deal with. There are about a million side effects of using this flag and for general applicaitons there is just no need to do it.

android hidden app strategy

I'm trying to create an app "hidden" from applications list.
The way i though the user will start the app is through a Receiver listening for NEW_OUTGOING_CALL and intercept a particular number dialed.
The problem is that on new Android versions, this receiver will never be activated if the app never start once. (Starting the application from a BroadCastReceiver (NEW_OUTGOING_CALL doesn't always work)).
I can't figure out a workaround for this problem: the app launcher is totally hidden so the user cannot never launch the app, and the receiver would never be activated if the app will never start.
Is there any other strategy or workaround for hide and launch the app with some kind of secret action?
Create a activity with manifest file pointing it as the the Launcher activity and make it transparent and call its finish method in onCreate. User clicking on that icon will have no idea that the activity is opened. But why don't you show the About application kind of screen in the launcher activity?

Notification to not reload app in android

I am currently developing an android app which uses the android web browser and notifications.
What I want to be able to do is the user clicks on an item which loads the android web browser and makes a notification in the notification bar as well.
The user should be on the browser when they go the notification, so when the user is on the browser and they click on the notification I want the notification to perform its task but not redisplay the app activity instead just return to where the user was on the browser.
I've tried setting the different flags on the activity but none of them seem to make any difference.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
According to the following quote from the Android documentation, it sounds like there isn't a way to do some kind of background task without starting an activity when a user clicks a notification. Although you may want to look into sending an Intent to a Service. I've have not tried that before so I can't say whether it works or not.
A notification always starts an
activity as a new task (that is, it
puts FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK in the
intent it passes to startActivity())
The documentation also suggests you could have a dedicated activity that could perform the copy paste, and then the user could simply press back to get back to the browser:
For example, when the user receives a
Calendar notification, choosing that
notification starts a special activity
that displays a list of upcoming
calendar events — this view is
available only from the notification,
not through the Calendar's own user
interface. After viewing this upcoming
event, to ensure that the user
pressing the BACK key will return to
the activity the user was in when they
picked the notification, you would
make sure this dedicated activity does
not have the same task affinity as the
Calendar or any other activity. (You
do this by setting task affinity to
the empty string, which means it has
no affinity to anything.)
To get round this as I did not want to have a service running in the background to perform this simple task what I have done is called the method at the end of the activity that the notification calls.
I call moveTaskToBack(true); which places the task into the background. As if the user presses the home button.

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