Is there a way to make an NFC application read a tag over all other applications that may be downloaded on the phone?
Usually, if more than one application can read a given tag, then the user is prompted with which application to open. I would like to skip this step and have my application automatically open.
Any resources or actual code would be really helpful. This is just part of a research project so I don't even need to code the application, I would just like to know if it is possible and potentially build a proof of concept application if I have time.
No, but you can use filters to specify a specific NDEF tag type to look for. In that case only your app would be brought up, but if another app is also looking for that exact same tag type, both apps will be brought up.
Related
[EDITED]
I want to create an application that discourages the usage of social media applications. Like if they open Instagram or something then the Flutter app will know.
How would I detect if another application (Such as Instagram or Twitter) is open when my Flutter app is opened?
If this is difficult to implement in Flutter, can anyone suggest some other languages or code for this functionality?
Thanks!!
It is possible at least on Android. I do not program for IOS so I can't say for sure. As #Gaurav pointed out, the solution will need to be custom-made and it probably won't be specific to Flutter. If you are willing to work outside Flutter than it is possible.
Once again, the following solutions are for Android devices:
Solution 1: Since you are targeting social media apps you can lookup the public intents of each app (i.e. Facebook, WhatsApp, etc...) find out the names of the intents they are broadcasting and add a broadcast receiver in your application. Many will say this is not a good idea because the app developer's themselves could change the intents and that you shouldn't listen for anything that hasn't been declared for public use. They are probably right, but this discussion is about how to detect the other apps launching and this method works.
Simply google how to add a broadcast receiver, a good example can be found here.
There are websites that contain databases for a lot of broadcast intents for popular Android applications, but if you have trouble finding the name of a particular one then I'd suggest using ADB to find it. For example, Facebook would be:
adb shell pm dump com.facebook.katana | grep ' filter' | cut -d ' ' -f 12
In some versions of Android broadcast intents do not work, however registering it in the application has worked pretty well for myself.
Once you have a listener setup properly, then you can detect the app when the user launches it and process it accordingly.
Solution 2: You could monitor the processes on the Android device via "Process" and/or "PackageManager" and see when one of the social media applications popup. This method is not very reliable because apps are on all the time and just because they're in the process list doesn't mean they are actively being used.
Solution 3: Once again, this is a very "hacky" solution, but you could listen to the logs on each device. Basically get the output of console logs, read the last 100 lines and see if the app is doing something. If so, then you may be able to determine if the app is active. The biggest problem with this solution (besides trying to read logs on all your user's devices) is that this is not an instant solution and may require special privileges depending on the device you're working on. You would also probably need to setup a service that actively listens and reads the logs, which might cause some significant battery usage.
I am new to android development. I came to know that Intent and Intent filters can be used to share data among applications but I wonder if it is possible to design an android application which can extract some specific information from other applications while running in the background. For example, if the user is using whatsapp it may get know the call drop rate or if a video is being played at user terminal in YouTube, Facebook or Netflix, it will get buffer playtime, video bitrate etc. I will be very grateful if answer to this question is provided with an example.
No, mostly no.
However, as wrote Tim Castelijns, if the 'target' app allows it, like via a content provider, its possible.
On a rooted device, after long hours of reverse engineering the targeted apps, it MAY also be possible to get some info. Only from rooted devices too.
Other case is you write several app and design that they can communicate together, like via intents, content providers.
There is also possible to get the list of running apps (user must permit it)
In Android, each application is running on its own "sandbox" that is supposed to be isolated from the rest of the applications running on the device.
In order for an application to communicate with other applications, the Android framework supplies several mechanisms to send/receive data to/from other applications: Intents, IPC (AIDL), Content Providers etc...
Each application that wants to expose its data to other applications on the device needs to implement an interface using one or more of the mechanisms described above.
That means that if an application doesn't implement an interface to expose its data or inner workings, it won't be possible for another application to access this information.
Keep in mind that some applications choose to save some of their data on publicly available disk spaces (i.e. a camera that takes pictures might save them on the SDcard that is accessible by all applications). In that case, if you know what to look for, you can tell certain things about certain applications.
In addition, the Android operation system exposes the states of several global settings such as: Device's connectivity state, Battery state, currently opened Bluetooth interfaces, running applications, last executed apps etc...
This configurations might give you an overall idea of what is happening on the device.
As indicated in other answers, you're mostly limited to what apps will explicitly make available to you; in fact, well-engineered apps will generally try to prevent "information leakage" beyond what they actually want to make available.
Some other people mentioned Content Providers but the one other construct to look into is Broadcasts. If an app broadcasts an intent locally (i.e. is using the Local Broadcast Manager) you won't be able to see it but if they're using a "system-wide" broadcast or receiving another "system-wide" broadcast you can receive the same event.
I'm writing a handful of NFC-capable apps for work.
I've got two of them on my tablet right now, and they are set to launch if an NFC tag is detected and they're not already open. So since I have two of them on the same device now I get an App Picker dialog. This is great.
What I would like is to make it so that if one of the apps is already open, that when the NFC tag is detected it doesn't show the app picker, but just uses the current activity to handle the NFC intent. How possible is this? Thanks
If the foreground activity is using enableForegroundDispatch(), it will take precedence over anything else registered in the manifest for the tag.
Here is a sample app that demonstrates the use of enableForegroundDispatch(), to write text shared from another app (e.g., URL from the Browser) to an NFC tag.
Is it possible to track on Android from where somebody has started an application (i.e. from the drawer, from recent apps menu, or from desktop shortcuts, etc.)?
Sorry, but this isn't possible.
Even if it was, consider how easily such functionality could be abused by malicious software. You can listen to intents directed at you, and those that are broadcast, but application launching should not be a broadcast event.
What you may be able to do is replace the launcher. If the user agrees to it.
You might also be able to hack a work-around by reading the logcat logs. For instance, give your application the android.permission.READ_LOGS permission and parse the logs to determine the application that launched it. This is just an idea, however... it sounds like something you wouldn't want to rely on.
If you built your own home screen it could give you some of that information.
But on a stock device with any available home screens no probably not.
When a user tries to launch an application I want to suppress that application and then call another application. Example I want the user to authenticate himself before launching a particular system application (settings application etc). The authentication application should pop up every time the user launches the settings application
I know you will have to use broadcast receivers and intents but have no clue how to do it.
Sounds like you should create a "lib" project that have public interfaces that you can use.
Then share them between the apps instead of trying to execute another app?
But what I know this is not possible to actually execute up another app, since this then gives dependency to something that you don't know if it is installed. It must already been started if the intents should work.
Also like the answer before, it could be used for abuse.
Look at this link for more information:
http://mylifewithandroid.blogspot.com/2007/12/playing-with-intents.html
I sort of hope this isn't possible... Launching a different application from the one the user actually clicked? Leaves the door open for abuse.