Service with Overlay - catch back button press

Question

How can i do that?

Current solution

I launch a transparent activity, that catches the back press, forwards it to my service and closes itself afterwards. But this activity will be visible in the current running activities and therefore it's not a very beautiful solution.

Solutions seen

I've seen an app that does catch the back press in a service - without an activity that catches the back press. If I show the current running activities, there is nothing from this app.

Question

How can this be done? I've read so many threads that say, this is not possible, but I can see, that there are apps that achieve that somehow...

Answer 1

If you have an overlay window attached in a WindowManager in your service, put your view the attribute setFocusableInTouchMode(true), and put a key listener. You'll receive key events, like in this example:

view.setFocusableInTouchMode(true);
view.setOnKeyListener(new View.OnKeyListener() {
    @Override
    public boolean onKey(View v, int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
        if(keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_BACK) {
            stopSelf();
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
});

Edited, I didn't use good stackoverflow account