How to get the sender of an Intent?

Question

Is there a way for an Activity to find out who (i.e. class name) has sent an Intent? I'm looking for a generic way for my Activity to respond to a received intent by sending one back to the sender, whoever that may be.

Answer 1

There may be another way, but the only solution I know of is having Activity A invoke Activity B via startActivityForResult(). Then Activity B can use getCallingActivity() to retrieve Activity A's identity.

Answer 2

Is it an external app you receive the intent from? You could use the getReferrer() method of the activity class

A simple example: I opened google map app to share some location with my app by using the share option of google maps. Then my app opens and this method call in the Activity:

 this.getReferrer().getHost()

will return:

 com.google.android.apps.maps

see documentation here: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#getReferrer()

Note that this requires API 22. For older Android versions see answer from ajwillliams

Answer 3

A technique I use is to require the application sending the relevant Intent to add a PendingIntent as a Parcelable extra; the PendingIntent can be of any type (service, broadcast, etc.). The only thing my service does is call PendingIntent.getCreatorUid() and getCreatorPackage(); this information is populated when the PendingIntent is created and cannot be forged by the app so I can get the info about an Intent's sender. Only caveat is that solution only works from Jellybean and later which is my case. Hope this helps,

Answer 4

This isn't incredibly direct but you can get a list of the recent tasks from ActivityManager. So the caller would essentially be the task before yours and you can fetch info on that task.

Example usage:

ActivityManager am = (ActivityManager) this.getSystemService(ACTIVITY_SERVICE);
List<ActivityManager.RecentTaskInfo> recentTasks = am.getRecentTasks(10000,ActivityManager.RECENT_WITH_EXCLUDED);

The above will return a list of all the tasks from most recent (yours) to the limit specified. See docs here for the type of info you can get from a RecentTaskInfo object.