broadcastreceiver - How can one detect an Android application launching?

Question

Is it possible to detect when an app is executed (i.e., when the user clicks on the app's icon)? I attempted to register an intent of type Intent.ACTION_MAIN using a category of of type Intent.CATEGORY_LAUNCHER hoping this would let me know whenever an app is launched. The problem is, my broadcast receiver is never getting called.

Is this an illegal intent/category combination for which to register? Is there some method I can use to determine when an application launch occurs?

Answer 1

The application start Intent is not a broadcast, so there is no way to register a broadcast receiver and receive it. As previously answered here, there really is no way to detect the launch of the app. You could possibly write a service that polled the running tasks looking for the application's task (using the ActivityManager interface), but that's the best I can think of and it probably wouldn't be very performant.