Android Intent for Twitter application

Question

Is it possible to show a list of applications (with intent.createChooser) that only show me my twitter apps on my phone (so htc peep (htc hero) or twitdroid). I have tried it with intent.settype("application/twitter") but it doesnt find any apps for twitter and only shows my mail apps.

Thank you,

Wouter

Answer 1

I'm posting this because I haven't seen a solution yet that does exactly what I want.

This primarily launches the official Twitter app, or if that is not installed, either brings up a "Complete action using..." dialog (like this) or directly launches a web browser.

For list of different parameters in the twitter.com URL, see the Tweet Button docs. Remember to URL encode the parameter values. (This code is specifically for tweeting a URL; if you don't want that, just leave out the url param.)

// Create intent using ACTION_VIEW and a normal Twitter url:
String tweetUrl = String.format("https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=%s&url=%s",
        urlEncode("Tweet text"), 
        urlEncode("https://www.google.fi/"));
Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse(tweetUrl));

// Narrow down to official Twitter app, if available:
List<ResolveInfo> matches = getPackageManager().queryIntentActivities(intent, 0);
for (ResolveInfo info : matches) {
    if (info.activityInfo.packageName.toLowerCase().startsWith("com.twitter")) {
        intent.setPackage(info.activityInfo.packageName);
    }
}

startActivity(intent);

(URL encoding is cleaner if you have a little utility like this somewhere, e.g. "StringUtils".)

public static String urlEncode(String s) {
    try {
        return URLEncoder.encode(s, "UTF-8");
    }
    catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        Log.wtf(TAG, "UTF-8 should always be supported", e);
        throw new RuntimeException("URLEncoder.encode() failed for " + s);
    }
}

For example, on my Nexus 7 device, this directly opens the official Twitter app:

If official Twitter app is not installed and user either selects Chrome or it opens automatically (as the only app which can handle the intent):

Answer 2

The solutions posted before, allow you to post directly on your first twitter app. To show a list of twitters app (if there are more then one), you can custom your Intent.createChooser to show only the Itents you want.

The trick is add EXTRA_INITIAL_INTENTS to the default list, generated from the createChoose, and remove the others Intents from the list.

Look at this sample where I create a chooser that shows only my e-mails apps. In my case appears three mails: Gmail, YahooMail and the default Mail.

private void share(String nameApp, String imagePath) {
    List<Intent> targetedShareIntents = new ArrayList<Intent>();
    Intent share = new Intent(android.content.Intent.ACTION_SEND);
    share.setType("image/jpeg");
    List<ResolveInfo> resInfo = getPackageManager().queryIntentActivities(share, 0);
    if (!resInfo.isEmpty()){
        for (ResolveInfo info : resInfo) {
            Intent targetedShare = new Intent(android.content.Intent.ACTION_SEND);
            targetedShare.setType("image/jpeg"); // put here your mime type

            if (info.activityInfo.packageName.toLowerCase().contains(nameApp) || 
                    info.activityInfo.name.toLowerCase().contains(nameApp)) {
                targetedShare.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT,     "My body of post/email");
                targetedShare.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_STREAM, Uri.fromFile(new File(imagePath)) );
                targetedShare.setPackage(info.activityInfo.packageName);
                targetedShareIntents.add(targetedShare);
            }
        }

        Intent chooserIntent = Intent.createChooser(targetedShareIntents.remove(0), "Select app to share");
        chooserIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_INITIAL_INTENTS, targetedShareIntents.toArray(new Parcelable[]{}));
        startActivity(chooserIntent);
    }
}

You can run like that: share("twi", "/sdcard/dcim/Camera/photo.jpg");

This was based on post: Custom filtering of intent chooser based on installed Android package name

Answer 3

This question is a bit older, but since I have just come across a similar problem, it may also still be of interest to others. First, as mentioned by Peter, create your intent:

Intent tweetIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
tweetIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "Test; please ignore");
tweetIntent.setType("application/twitter");

"application/twitter" is in fact a known content type, see here. Now, when you try to start an activity with this intent, it will show all sorts of apps that are not really Twitter clients, but want a piece of the action. As already mentioned in a couple of the "why do you even want to do that?" sort of answers, some users may find that useful. On the other hand, if I have a button in my app that says "Tweet this!", the user would very much expect this to bring up a Twitter client.

Which means that instead of just launching an activity, we need to filter out the ones that are appropriate:

PackageManager pm = getPackageManager();
List<ResolveInfo> lract 
= pm.queryIntentActivities(tweetIntent,
    PackageManager.MATCH_DEFAULT_ONLY);

boolean resolved = false;

for(ResolveInfo ri: lract)
{
    if(ri.activityInfo.name.endsWith(".SendTweet"))
    {
        tweetIntent.setClassName(ri.activityInfo.packageName,
                        ri.activityInfo.name);
        resolved = true;
        break;
    }
}

You would need to experiment a bit with the different providers, but if the name ends in ".SendTweet" you are pretty safe (this is the activity name in Twidroyd). You can also check your debugger for package names you want to use and adjust the string comparison accordingly (i.e. Twidroyd uses "com.twidroid.*").

In this simple example we just pick the first matching activity that we find. This brings up the Twitter client directly, without the user having to make any choices. If there are no proper Twitter clients, we revert to the standard activity chooser:

startActivity(resolved ? tweetIntent :
    Intent.createChooser(tweetIntent, "Choose one"));

You could expand the code and take into account the case that there is more than one Twitter client, when you may want to create your own chooser dialog from all the activity names you find.

Answer 4

It is entirely possible your users will only ever, now and forever, only want to post to Twitter.

I would think that it is more likely that your users want to send information to people, and Twitter is one possibility. But, they might also want to send a text message, or an email, etc.

In that case, use ACTION_SEND, as described here. Twidroid, notably, supports ACTION_SEND, so it will appear in the list of available delivery mechanisms.

Answer 5

These answers are all overly complex.

If you just do a normal url Intent that does to Twitter.com, you'll get this screen:

which gives you the option of going to the website if you have no Twitter apps installed.

String url = "https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?source=webclient&text=TWEET+THIS!";
Intent i = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
i.setData(Uri.parse(url));
startActivity(i);

Answer 6

Either

• You start an activity with an Intent with action Intent.ACTION_SEND and the text/plain MIME type. You'll have all applications that support sending text. That should be any twitter client, as well as Gmail, dropbox, etc.
• Or, you try to look up for the specific action of every client you are aware of, like "com.twitter.android.PostActivity" for the official client. That will point to this client, and that is unlikely to be a complete list.
• Or, you start with the second point, and fall back on the first...

Answer 7

Nope. The intent type is something like image/png or application/pdf, i.e. a file type, and with createChooser you're basically asking which apps can open this file type.

Now, there's no such thing as an application/twitter file that can be opened, so that won't work. I'm not aware of any other way you can achieve what you want either.

Answer 8

I used "billynomates" answer and was able to use hashtags by using the "URLEncoder.encode(, "UTF-8")" function. The hash tags showed up just fine.

String originalMessage = "some message #MESSAGE";

String originalMessageEscaped = null;
try {
   originalMessageEscaped = String.format(
    "https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?source=webclient&text=%s",
    URLEncoder.encode(originalMessage, "UTF-8"));
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
}

if(originalMessageEscaped != null) {
   Intent i = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
   i.setData(Uri.parse(originalMessageEscaped));
   startActivity(i);
}
else {
   // Some Error
}

Answer 9

From http://twidroid.com/plugins/

Twidroid’s ACTION_SEND intent

Intent sendIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND); 
sendIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "This is a sample message via Public Intent"); 
sendIntent.setType("application/twitter");   
startActivity(Intent.createChooser(sendIntent, null));