PhoneGap - Open external application

Question

I am developing a PhoneGap App, All what I need is to open an external application.

e.g. my app namespace is com.demo.app1 and I need to open the com.demo.app2 application, Is this feasible ?

• I am using PhoneGap 3.3
• I found that there is many versions of the WebIntent plugin
• An example may help :)

Thanks

Answer 1

You can crea a plugin with this java code:

Intent LaunchIntent = this.cordova.getActivity().getPackageManager().getLaunchIntentForPackage("com.demo.app2");
this.cordova.getActivity().startActivity(LaunchIntent);

or try any of this 2 plugins for launching apps

https://github.com/lampaa/org.apache.cordova.startapp

https://github.com/dmedvinsky/cordova-startapp

Answer 2

Finally found my old code of when I was using webintent :

   CDV.WEBINTENT.launchActivity("com.demo.app1",
            function() {
                console.log("Activity started");
            },
            function() {
                console.log("Error starting activity");
            }
    );

There are two different gits for webintent referenced in phonegap build for phonegap 3.x, no idea what the differences are (and the first one is the one I was using) :

• https://github.com/InQBarna/WebIntent.git
• https://github.com/Tunts/WebIntent/
• https://github.com/acen99/WebIntent/

And an other usefull plugin is the webavailability plugin that lets you know if the other app is installed before you try to launch it : https://github.com/ohh2ahh/AppAvailability.git

I stopped using webintent because I needed to be able to switch to an app if it was already started and not relanch it.

EDIT: oops again, launchactivity was a function I added to the plugin... will check later how I was doing before this.

Answer 3

In iOS to open any application you need to know which URLs schemes supported by this app.

For example, you can open email-writer by url like "mailto:[email protected]". But the thing is in application you can declare your own scheme. For example in App1 you can declare scheme like "my-app1-scheme". And in your second app you will need to open URL "my-app1-scheme://" and your App1 will be opened.

And I just found this plugin that allows you to do this in simpler way: https://github.com/EddyVerbruggen/LaunchMyApp-PhoneGap-Plugin