Activities and Intents

Activity - Visual component of a application (such as text view, button, action bar and etc), which execute a action, activity can lunch another activity via intents.

Intents - Message object to request an action from another app component

Intent example - We can execute a different app view the name, such as appname://host/others

Activity Manager

a executable that can be used to call activates, services and broadcast receivers.

To start a intent we can do:

am start -n package-name/activity-name

More info: https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/adb#am

For example:

C:\\Users\\iron\\Documents\\android-platform-tools>adb.exe shell am start -n com.er.mo.apps.mypasswords/com.er.mo.apps.mypasswords.settings.AppearanceSettings --ei com.er.mo.apps.mypasswords.EXTRA_SUFCXNUQVRF 2
Starting: Intent { cmp=com.er.mo.apps.mypasswords/.settings.AppearanceSettings (has extras) }

Example #2

adb.exe shell am start -n com.irccloud.android/com.irccloud.android.activity.SAMLAuthActivity -e title "POC" -e auth_url "<https://google.com>"

We can also trigger it from a new app perspective. Start a new project in Android Studio as empty and add the following code to the MainActivity

        override fun onResume() {
            super.onResume()
            val intent = intent.setClassName("com.irccloud.android", "com.irccloud.android.activity.SAMLAuthActivity")
            intent.putExtra("title","IRC CLOUD POC")
            intent.putExtra("auth_url","<https://google.com.com>")
            startActivity(intent)
        }

Intent Filter

Application creates intent filters which are rule that search for a certain pattern and if a rule is matched it will trigger the intent.

Table of Content:

Broadcast receivers