Launch custom android application from android browser

Question

Can anybody please guide me regarding how to launch my android application from the android browser?

Answer 1

Please see my comment here: Make a link in the Android browser start up my app?

We strongly discourage people from using their own schemes, unless they are defining a new world-wide internet scheme.

Answer 2

You need to add a pseudo-hostname to the CALLBACK_URL 'app://' doesn't make sense as a URL and cannot be parsed.

Answer 3

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.

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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.

Answer 4

The following link gives information on launching the app (if installed) directly from browser. Otherwise it directly opens up the app in play store so that user can seamlessly download.

https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/intents

Answer 5

In my case I had to set two categories for the <intent-filter> and then it worked:

<intent-filter>
<data android:scheme="my.special.scheme" />
<action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"/>
<category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE"/>
</intent-filter>

Answer 6

There should also be <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE"/> added to the intent filter to make the activity recognized properly from the link.