Is there a way an app can check if it is allowed to access notifications?

Question

I want to implement an NotificationListenerService to get access to all notifications that are posted to the notification bar.

I understand that I need to enable access to the Notifications in the Settings with this call:

startActivity(new Intent("android.settings.ACTION_NOTIFICATION_LISTENER_SETTINGS"));

Is there a way to check if the user activated Notification access for my app?

Answer 1

I managed to find a slight hack to solve this. If you check the source of Settings.Secure, you will see that ENABLED_NOTIFICATION_LISTENERS is annotated with @hide. I don't know if this is intentional or not. On a related topic, CommonsWare does mention in another answer that there is a bug preventing the starting of this setting so I guess is unintentional.

Anyway, to work around this, all I did was to fetch the current list of enabled notification listeners using the string value of ENABLED_NOTIFICATION_LISTENERS:

String enabledListeners = Settings.Secure.getString(context.getContentResolver(), 
    "enabled_notification_listeners");

Then you just have to check if your service is in the list.

I did not test this on all API >= 18 yet but it is working on Android 4.4.2.