Android: How to draw free on top of anything (any activity)

Question

How do you draw a view on top of all other activities regardless of what they are showing and without using transparent activities or consuming its touch events.

Its lik

Answer 1

Take a look at this cool article, I think that's exactly what you want :

http://www.piwai.info/chatheads-basics

In short : you want to add this permission to your manifest :

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW" />

For api >= 23, you'll need to request the runtime permission Settings.ACTION_MANAGE_OVERLAY_PERMISSION

Then in a service, get the window manager

windowManager = (WindowManager) getSystemService(WINDOW_SERVICE);

and add your views with the addView method

Answer 2

Take a look at WindowManager. You can do something like (WindowManager)mContext.getSystemService("window"); if you want to get the root view and use the method addView(view, params) if you want to add a view.