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we will end up with 100+ Android tablets for our shop. On the 'Owner Info' screen, I need to have some text such as 'Property of... If found, return it to "address"'. I don't want to type this into each tablet manually (because we may change this address in the future). So is there a way to code an app that will write the 'owner info' to a tablet from a common text file or something on those lines? Thanks for any input.

user1005585
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  • Is this 'Owner Info' screen a built in feature of your device? or a 3rd party created application? I have not ever run across a stock device that has this feature. If you are using a 3rd party app to do it, it would be up to the app creator to enable the automation of data entry with some API for you to use. – FoamyGuy May 10 '12 at 18:39
  • Yes, it's a Lenovo Thinkpad tablet and this feature is built in. I contacted Lenovo, but they weren't of much help. So I'm looking for an Android API or something on those lines... – user1005585 May 10 '12 at 19:02

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Two thoughts:

Depending one how new/up-to-date the devices are, if you're looking to write something you can look at ContactsContract.Profile That's a relatively new API (version 14) so it's only in ICS. On older devices you can get that kind of info from Contacts, but there's no simple way to know which contact to use. I recently tried finding a path from Accounts either useful info or to a "owner" contact and only ended up with heuristics that would work 80% of the time, like "pick the first account with type 'com.google' use find a contact whose email address matches the login on that account". Probably would work most of the time, but I wouldn't want to stake my life on it.

If you don't want to write an app, Contact Owner is an app that I stumbled upon, which looking up the previous answer that does something very similar. It appears to pull the info from a user selected contact.

asudell
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  • I wouldn't mind writing an app to populate the Owner Info, except that I don't know which API to use or cannot find the right API to use... – user1005585 May 10 '12 at 20:09
  • Prior to ICS there isn't a good API to get to "the device user". So I don't know that there's a great answer in 3.1. In any case, I'd seriously look at Contact Owner and see if it comes close enough to solving your problem before I'd invest a pile of time building a one-off app that will take as long as typing user names on 100 tablets. – asudell May 13 '12 at 03:10