How to confirm whether Android app is launched by DeepLink or normal launch?

Question

I have an application where I need to do different task on different launch types. How to detect that app has been launched by deeplink, when my app was in background.

Answer 1

Assuming you already have an activity ready with the required intents what you'll to do is check your activity's if(getIntent().getAction() != null) which means it was launched via a deep-link. Normal intents used for navigation will return null.

Now the issue is if your activity was already running in background and you wrote this code in onCreate(), and the deep-linked activity was set to android:launchMode="singleTask" or launched with a FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP it won't trigger again.

For this you will have to override onNewIntent(Intent intent) method of your activity, this way you can know each time your activity is started from an intent. Again, here you can check if(intent.getAction() != null) and intent.getData() to retrieve the data.

One thing to note is to avoid running the same code twice in onCreate and onNewIntent

In case you haven't implemented deep-linking in your app yet you will first need to make use of <intent-filter> to make an activity be available to handle the intent when clicking on a link etc. as an example

        <intent-filter>
            <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
            <data
                android:host="www.example.com"
                android:pathPattern="/.*"
                android:scheme="https" />
        </intent-filter>

You can read more about on the official Docs here as someone already suggested.