Can anybody please guide me regarding how to launch my android application from the android browser?
Use an <intent-filter>
with a <data>
element. For example, to handle all links to twitter.com, you'd put this inside your <activity>
in your AndroidManifest.xml
:
<intent-filter>
<data android:scheme="http" android:host="twitter.com"/>
<action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
</intent-filter>
Then, when the user clicks on a link to twitter in the browser, they will be asked what application to use in order to complete the action: the browser or your application.
Of course, if you want to provide tight integration between your website and your app, you can define your own scheme:
<intent-filter>
<data android:scheme="my.special.scheme" />
<action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
</intent-filter>
Then, in your web app you can put links like:
<a href="my.special.scheme://other/parameters/here">
And when the user clicks it, your app will be launched automatically (because it will probably be the only one that can handle my.special.scheme://
type of uris). The only downside to this is that if the user doesn't have the app installed, they'll get a nasty error. And I'm not sure there's any way to check.
Edit: To answer your question, you can use getIntent().getData()
which returns a Uri
object. You can then use Uri.*
methods to extract the data you need. For example, let's say the user clicked on a link to http://twitter.com/status/1234
:
Uri data = getIntent().getData();
String scheme = data.getScheme(); // "http"
String host = data.getHost(); // "twitter.com"
List<String> params = data.getPathSegments();
String first = params.get(0); // "status"
String second = params.get(1); // "1234"
You can do the above anywhere in your Activity
, but you're probably going to want to do it in onCreate()
. You can also use params.size()
to get the number of path segments in the Uri
. Look to javadoc or the android developer website for other Uri
methods you can use to extract specific parts.