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is it possible somehow to listen to the events of the ActivityManager, e.g. when activities are started? Does the ActivityManager send broadcasts? I havn't found anything indicating that it does.

What I basically need to do: I want my app to launch one of my activities whenever a certain (thirdparty) app is launched/takes focus. Problem is this needs to happen before the thirdparty app is actually displayed.

What I have tried so far as workarounds:

  1. Logcat output: I query logcat every 0.8s (filtered to show ActivityManager events only) but this eats up to many ressources
  2. getRunningTasks: Slows down the phone a lot too and is not very safe, as an activity might be running but not currently in focus

Any ideas?

Vadim Kotov
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ChristianS
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3 Answers3

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I think you can use the launch mode to determine which activity to launch to top level. Please check the question: Android singleTask or singleInstance launch mode?. Maybe it will help you.

Community
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Golden
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I suppose there is no actually other legacy way to handle glabal system state, only

 (ActivityManager)getSystemService(Context.ACTIVITY_SERVICE);

ActivityManager.getRecentTasks() - Return a list of the tasks that are currently running, with the most recent being first and older ones after in order.

For details check docs

Perhaps though Android is a Linux you can run system tools like 

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ps -aux | grep smth")

But I think it would be hard to detect particular java application.

ponkin
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I had a look in the android source, but there doesn't seem to be any events broadcasted.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/providers/ApplicationsProvider

Vadim Kotov
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dparnas
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  • Do you think it would be possible to update the Activitylauncher.java in a way that it does broadcast and replace it with the one on the user's device then (for root users only obviously)? I guess this won't work due to the ROM's digital signature. – ChristianS Feb 17 '10 at 11:12