Android: Is there a programming way to create a web shortcut on home screen

Question

Do you know is there a programmatic way to create a web shortcut on the phone user's home screen?

What I want to do is:

When the phone user clicks a button in our Android application, the application will then place a website shortcut onto the phone user's home screen.

Answer 1

First you'll need to add a permission to your manifest.xml

<uses-permission
            android:name="com.android.launcher.permission.INSTALL_SHORTCUT">
</uses-permission>

You'll need to build an intent to view the webpage. Something like...

Intent i = new Intent();
i.setAction(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
i.setData(Uri.parse("http://www.blablaba.com"));

You can test this by creating a little test app and doing startActivity(i); This should open the browser. Once you verified that the above intent is correct you should move on to the next step.

Now you'll need to actually install the shortcut.

    Intent installer = new Intent();
    installer.putExtra("android.intent.extra.shortcut.INTENT", i);
    installer.putExtra("android.intent.extra.shortcut.NAME", "THE NAME OF SHORTCUT TO BE SHOWN");
    installer.putExtra("android.intent.extra.shortcut.ICON_RESOURCE", I THINK this is a bitmap); //can also be ignored too
    installer.setAction("com.android.launcher.action.INSTALL_SHORTCUT");
    sendBroadcast(installer)

;

It's also possible some home screens don't accept this, but most do. So enjoy.

EDIT: Icon can be set to the shortcut using:

installer.putExtra("android.intent.extra.shortcut.ICON_RESOURCE", Intent.ShortcutIconResource.fromContext(mContext, R.drawable.icon));