How to get the content of running applications in Android?

Question

I want to make a application that has similar function as Android Beam, but the question is how to get the content of those running apps. For example, if the web browser, Youtube and Google Map is running, how do I get the web address, the video link and the location? Thank You.

Answer 1

You will only be able to get information like this if the running application provides it through some sort of global access method, e.g. a service or content provider. It is highly unlikely that any application will do this as it has some serious security/privacy implications.

Answer 2

For Android Beam, the app itself is sharing the data. The NFC background service gets the data to be shared via Android Beam delivered to it by the app's Activities. An Activity either calls at the beginning (e.g. in onResume()) the method NfcAdapter.setNdefPushMessage() to share a static piece of data or it calls NfcAdapter.setNdefPushMessageCallback() to register a callback that will create the data to be shared at the moment Android Beam becomes active.

A number of the standard Android and Google apps have been extended to support this in Android 4.0 ICS, for example Browser, Gmail, Maps, People and Youtube. Apps that have no support for this, will by default share a link to the download page of that app in the Google Play store.

Answer 3

You will only be able to develop such an application by writing a system application aka you'll need root permissions.

The best approach in my opinion will be that you look through the Android Beam source code, to see how it's done there. The official API will not help you here. Since the functions used in such system applications is not in the API there is no guarantee that it will work with future versions of Android, so be careful.

I doubt that this will be an easy task. If it's really similar to Android Beam, try building your code on top of the official source.