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Can I develop an android application that can capture events of another (not developed by me) application?

Better, can I make my application work in background for capturing events (like number of tapping on screen, buttons tapped, amount of scrolling used, tap on 'back' button etc.) of another application that I'm using?

If I could, I don't ask a solution for the problem but I appreciate if you give me some keywords to search for and/or some links of documentation or other stuff that help me. However first of all I'd need to know if what I want to do is actually possible to do.

P.S. Sorry for my english not so good :)

redgiun
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1 Answers1

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This is normally called 'spyware' and fortunately cannot be done on Android.

Nikolay Elenkov
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  • Ahah ok maybe it seems something wrong. The real goal is to measure the difficulty of using a certain application. To measure the time the user takes to achieve certain goals, the errors the user do using the app and so on. Technically I want to measure the "cognitive load" of some applications (and their gui) by collecting statistics about their usage. – redgiun Oct 02 '12 at 09:45
  • You cannot do this without modifying the applications you want to test. You have to instrument them to collect the statistics you want, which is easiest to do if you have their source code. Otherwise you have to modify the bytecode which is doable but generally not trivial. – Nikolay Elenkov Oct 02 '12 at 12:02