I am new to Andorid development.
I am trying to write a small application for Android device.
One thing that I want is to get information from another installed application.
EDIT:
I want my application to do A and B, and I found a application that already does part A,so what I am trying to do is to extend the functionality of the existing application
is there a generic way to retrieve information from another app?
#dprogramz gave a really good answer but to build on it you may want to take a look at startActivityForResult if you're looking to get a photo or use input from some external activity.
Documentation is here
What information?
If it is shared information that lives in a shared directory then it shouldn't be any problem at all.
If it is protected information you will have to give your app access to these files.
If it is "real-time" information you will have to invoke an API. take a look at the application class
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Application.html
yes, there is a possibility to extend a app X with a feature A. You can add a new feature B to the app and make it more scalable and realiable,
only if-
Project is Open-Source:
You can contribute to the app via github and push changes.
If the owner likes it, you can be hire.
OR
Download the existing the project, make changes and upload it.
Related
I want to deploy the app on play store then after a user downloads the app and opens it, the app will prompt some guide or tutorial per module or function to guide the user. Is there any easy way to do it ?
Note: It's okay if the tutorial prompts again if the user deletes the app and reinstall.
The most consistent way I've found is to use something like these ShowcaseView or MaterialShowcaseView to display the tutorial, then save that your user has already seen it using something like Shared Preferences. Upon next opening, all you have to do is check the Shared Preferences again to see if the user has already seen that tutorial.
The earlier way was to use a view pager with images of the tutorials and show it once using the concept of preferences. Now we can use various third party library like ShowcaseView to show the tutorials and using preference you can avoid it showing every time the user opens the application.
You could install James Montemagnos Settings Plugin. It can write persisting data to the AppData on your mobile device. You will then create a bool in the Settings.cs-File. As soon as the Tutorial is over, you set this bool to true and you only show this tutorial when the bool is false.
I'm trying to receive a link shared from another application like browser or youtube into my phonegap app. I'm using phonegap build (build.phonegap.com) to make my app.
I'd like to know how to make my app appear in the 'share' list for links.
All solutions I found online are making me edit Android Manifest or Java files, but is there a way (a plugin of sorts) I can use to make data transfer between apps possible?
There is a plugin available for PhoneGap which will handle receiving content from other application. You can use it. Following is the link to this plugin. https://www.npmjs.com/package/cordova-plugin-intent
If you find any issue or something else other than that functionality, you can make the custom plugin so that you will have direct access of java file from javascript.
If I understand your question correctly, you're talking about deep linking in android. The details about it can be found here
Correct me if I explain your ideas wrong: What you want to do is that you have an URL that showed up in another application (Ex: Facebook Messenger, Slack, ...) and you want after clicking it, a list of application that can be used to open that link appear and you want your app to be listed there.
But here is the problem, how can the OS knows what apps it can suggest to the end-user and what kind of link your is acceptable to your app? the answer lies in your application manifest and to be more precise, the intent-filter tag. It tells the OS what you kind of url you want and also use it to determine if the OS should suggest your app to be open by using that link for the user.
So the answer for your question about doing without editing Manifest is impossible. As for the reason why you don't want to edit your apps is unknown to me but I still suggest you to take a look at this tutorial. It still involves editing your manifest but the guide it self is clear and easy to implement.
Hope this help ^^
my goal is to get a video from a usb connected device (an easycap video grabber) displayed. There is already an android app that does exactly that. However i need to add some buttons and some extra functions to it. So i came to the idea of displaying the app that already exists inside my app. Is that possible in any way?
I already tried to decompile the existing app to edit the code a bit but i didn't get anything to work with.
Do you have any other idea? If you know how to program that please let me know what i need to achieve that.
Thank you!
This cannot be done due to security reasons in the Android OS itself.
Android provides a security layer called the Sandbox in which the OS assigns a User ID for each app, so that an app will not have permission to access resources from another app.
I am running one external application from my own application and when this application opens, i want to get a view of that external application in my own application. So that i can capture a screenshot of it. Please help me in this.
I dont think thats possible. The communication between applications or even activities is limited to passing data to each other through intents. I don't think sharing references to objects across applications is possible. Please correct me.
Such a thing would be possible if they allowed you to launch an external application in your own window.
I did some search and it is quite likely it may not be possible, however I have found a possible way. Take a look at this link, which states that
Or If you want to take a ScreenShot of your current device screen (any
application) then you have to root permission, and read framebuffer
for that which will give raw data of current screen then convert it to
bitmap or any picture file you can do it in your service.
Which means that whenever your application starts an application you will need to create a service that reads the framebiffer, but if an activity is used for taking the screenshot then it will not be useful because the screenshot will then be of that activity.
See this and this, these links are related to your question as well. And see if it works.
Hope this helps.
I am very much new to android development!
I saw one existing application for android which will work as a first step in my app.
Actually a result of that application can be used as a input to my application.
But I don't know, is it possible to integrate existing application in your application?
If yes then definitely, that should be done only by having a code for that previous application, right???
If any one have any idea, what I am asking about, Please let me know. Thanks.
You can launch any Activity from your app but in order to get result from it, you need the developer of that activity to support it.
One example would be using "Barcode Scanner" app which is free and popular. Your app can use it by sending Intent asking to scan and return result instead of include the library into your app. Intent mechanism is Android way to do things.