Android - Get UserData using AccountManager / First and Last name of the phone owner

Question

I want to prepopulate some of the fields in my application to help out user when he is subscribing for the service inside my app.

So how would I get first name and last name of device's owner. I want to use default info tied to Google account; so far I got this:

AccountManager am = AccountManager.get(this);
Account[] accounts = am.getAccounts();
for (Account account : accounts) {
    if (account.type.compareTo("com.google") == 0)
    {
        String possibleEmail = account.name;
        // how to get firstname and lastname here?
    }             
}

I am willing to take alternative approaches if you suggest them - just as long as I can get email, firstname and lastname of the owner.

Answer 1

In Ice Cream Sandwich getting this information is easy, as Android includes a personal profile that represents the device owner - this profile is known as the "Me" profile and is stored in the ContactsContract.Profile table. You can read data from the user's profile so long as you request the READ_PROFILE and the READ_CONTACTS permissions in your AndroidManifest.xml.

The most relevant fields for you are the DISPLAY_NAME column from the Contact and possibly the StructuredName fields - stuff like the user's contact photo is also available.

There's an Android Code Lab tutorial that gives a full example of reading a user's profile, the core bit of code is in the ListProfileTask. Here's an abridged snippet:

Cursor c = activity.getContentResolver().query(ContactsContract.Profile.CONTENT_URI, null, null, null, null);
int count = c.getCount();
String[] columnNames = c.getColumnNames();
boolean b = c.moveToFirst();
int position = c.getPosition();
if (count == 1 && position == 0) {
    for (int j = 0; j < columnNames.length; j++) {
        String columnName = columnNames[j];
        String columnValue = c.getString(c.getColumnIndex(columnName)));
        ...
        // consume the values here
    }
}
c.close();

I don't think there's a way of getting this kind of data before API-level 14, unfortunately.