How to initialise Context in order to get the names of installed applications?

Question

I am trying to make a program to get the names of all installed applications. In my Activity, I have a method called getApplicationNames that should return this information:

private ArrayList<String> getApplicationNames(Context context){
    ArrayList<String> nameOfRunningApps = new ArrayList<>();
    List<ApplicationInfo> runningApplications = context.getPackageManager().getInstalledApplications(PackageManager.GET_META_DATA);

    for(ApplicationInfo applicationInfo: runningApplications){
        nameOfRunningApps.add(applicationInfo.name);
    }

    return nameOfRunningApps;
}

Now I want to call this method in onCreate():

ArrayList<String> installedProgramNames = getApplicationNames(??);

How do I make an instance of Context in order to call this method? Is this even possible?

`ArrayList installedProgramNames = getApplicationNames(this);` if you call method in onCreate() of Activity class — Rutvik Bhatt, Jun 14 '18 at 10:53
take a look at this https://stackoverflow.com/a/6838348/6414086 — emilpmp, Jun 14 '18 at 10:58

Sagar · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-14T11:03:06.607

1

Since Activity is basically extending Context in the hierarchy, you can easily achieve your requirement as follows inside onCreate():

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    ...
    ArrayList<String> installedProgramNames = getApplicationNames(this);
    ...
}

edited Jun 14 '18 at 11:03

answered Jun 14 '18 at 10:57

Sagar

23,903
4
62
62

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 14 '18 at 10:57

In Android the Activity class extends Context (see the heirarchy diagram at the top of the documentation page), so you can pass a self-reference to your activity into getApplicationNames via the this keyword, i.e.

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    ArrayList<String> installedProgramNames = getApplicationNames(this);
}

This is also true for other variations of Activity such as AppCompatActivity from the support libraries.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 14 '18 at 11:10

0

Using the application context will do the job.

ArrayList<String> installedProgramNames = getApplicationNames(getApplicationContext());

answered Jun 14 '18 at 11:10

Sujith Royal

762
10
9

How to initialise Context in order to get the names of installed applications?

3 Answers3