How to add a notification badge/count to application icon on Sony Xperia devices?

Question

With Sony's Xperia Home, certain apps have the ability to display a count bubble or badge on the app icon. Facebook and Facebook Messenger both do this, as well as the built in Email app.

This has been solved for Samsung's launcher, but I have not come across any documentation on how to do it for Sony's launcher.

How can it be done?

Answer 1

After having seen Daniel Ochoa's solution for Samsung's launcher, which uses a BadgeProvider to handle the badges, I set out to do the same for Sony's Xperia Home. This answer is taken directly from my blog.

How I figured it out - For anyone interested

I stumbled upon Sony's AppXplore and used it to check out the permission's of the Facebook app. The Facebook app requests the following permission, which is the key to displaying badges on Sony devices:

com.sonyericsson.home.permission.BROADCAST_BADGE

Next, I had a look through all available content providers but I found nothing related to app icon badges there. I ran the command in this answer to get a system dump file and searched for "badge" using Notepad++. I found this:

com.sonyericsson.home.action.UPDATE_BADGE: 41be9a90 com.sonyericsson.home/.BadgeService$BadgeReceiver filter 41be9858

So, it's handled using a BroadcastReciever on Sony as opposed to Samsung's Content Provider. So, I created a dummy BroadcastReciever of my own, listening for the action com.sonyericsson.home.action.UPDATE_BADGE, and found the extras passed to Sony's BadgeService. For this, I also needed a permission, but that was easy to find in the dump file:

com.sonyericsson.home.permission.RECEIVE_BADGE

The extras sent by Facebook, the Email app, etc, are:

• com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.ACTIVITY_NAME - The name of your app's main activity, android.intent.action.MAIN. This is so the launcher knows which icon to show the badge on.
• com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.SHOW_MESSAGE - a boolean indicating if we want to show the badge or not (which we do!)
• com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.MESSAGE - a string (not an integer - that took me a while to realize...) with the number to show.
• com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.PACKAGE_NAME - The name of your application package.

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How to show badges on your app's launcher icon on Sony Xperia devices

So, it turns out it's very simple to show a badge on your application icon in the launcher. IMO it's much more straight-forward than for Samsung's launcher. Here's a step-by-step-guide (and it's not long!)

1. Declare the com.sonyericsson.home.permission.BROADCAST_BADGE permission in your manifest file:

2. Broadcast an Intent to the BadgeReceiver:

   Intent intent = new Intent();
   
   intent.setAction("com.sonyericsson.home.action.UPDATE_BADGE");
   intent.putExtra("com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.ACTIVITY_NAME", "com.yourdomain.yourapp.MainActivity");
   intent.putExtra("com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.SHOW_MESSAGE", true);
   intent.putExtra("com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.MESSAGE", "99");
   intent.putExtra("com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.PACKAGE_NAME", "com.yourdomain.yourapp");
   
   sendBroadcast(intent);
   

3. Done. Once this Intent is broadcast the launcher should show a badge on your application icon.

4. To remove the badge again, simply send a new broadcast, this time with SHOW_MESSAGE set to false:

   intent.putExtra("com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.SHOW_MESSAGE", false);
   

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Good to know

The message is a string!

Since MESSAGE is a String, you can actually add words to the badge:

intent.putExtra("com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.MESSAGE", "Testing");

But I wouldn't do that 'cause it just looks weird.

You have access to all apps!

The BROADCAST_BADGE permission does not only give you access to your own app's icon, but to ALL of them. For example, here's how you can set Facebook's badge:

Intent intent = new Intent();
intent.setAction("com.sonyericsson.home.action.UPDATE_BADGE");
intent.putExtra("com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.ACTIVITY_NAME", "com.facebook.katana.LoginActivity");
intent.putExtra("com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.SHOW_MESSAGE", true);
intent.putExtra("com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.MESSAGE", "99");
intent.putExtra("com.sonyericsson.home.intent.extra.badge.PACKAGE_NAME", "com.facebook.katana");

sendBroadcast(intent);

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I hope this has been of help to someone! :)