Differentiating between an Activity launch from home screen or from another activity from App

Question

I need to know a generic way to distinguish between a call of activity from launcher and a call from another activity from inside my app, or a BACK on the activity stack

Anyone? this is bugging me for quite a while now and i need to put it to rest...

Thanks in advance JQCorreia

Answer 1

In the onCreate of your Activity, call getIntent(). If the Activity is started from the launcher (home screen) the values for getAction() will be android.intent.action.MAIN and the getCategories() will return a set which will contain the android.intent.category.LAUNCHER category. If the activity is started from elsewhere these values may be null.

Answer 2

In addition to @advantej's answer, you can extend each start-call to that activity adding an extra to the starting intent (e.g. intent.putExtra("caller", this.getClass().getSimpleName());

In the activity's onCreate method you can check then what @advantej suggests.

If the initiator is not the home-screen icon, than you can check further if the intent.hasExtra("caller") returns true, and if so, what is it.