CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidiosflutterdart
Robert Wong
Robert Wong

Reputation: 53

How to detect if another application is open in Flutter?

[EDITED] I want to create an application that discourages the usage of social media applications. Like if they open Instagram or something then the Flutter app will know.

How would I detect if another application (Such as Instagram or Twitter) is open when my Flutter app is opened?

If this is difficult to implement in Flutter, can anyone suggest some other languages or code for this functionality?

Thanks!!

Upvotes: 5

Views: 3956

Answers (1)

steven
steven

Reputation: 518

It is possible at least on Android. I do not program for IOS so I can't say for sure. As @Gaurav pointed out, the solution will need to be custom-made and it probably won't be specific to Flutter. If you are willing to work outside Flutter than it is possible.

Once again, the following solutions are for Android devices:

Solution 1: Since you are targeting social media apps you can lookup the public intents of each app (i.e. Facebook, WhatsApp, etc...) find out the names of the intents they are broadcasting and add a broadcast receiver in your application. Many will say this is not a good idea because the app developer's themselves could change the intents and that you shouldn't listen for anything that hasn't been declared for public use. They are probably right, but this discussion is about how to detect the other apps launching and this method works.

Simply google how to add a broadcast receiver, a good example can be found here.

There are websites that contain databases for a lot of broadcast intents for popular Android applications, but if you have trouble finding the name of a particular one then I'd suggest using ADB to find it. For example, Facebook would be:

adb shell pm dump com.facebook.katana | grep ' filter' | cut -d ' ' -f 12

In some versions of Android broadcast intents do not work, however registering it in the application has worked pretty well for myself.

Once you have a listener setup properly, then you can detect the app when the user launches it and process it accordingly.

Solution 2: You could monitor the processes on the Android device via "Process" and/or "PackageManager" and see when one of the social media applications popup. This method is not very reliable because apps are on all the time and just because they're in the process list doesn't mean they are actively being used.

Solution 3: Once again, this is a very "hacky" solution, but you could listen to the logs on each device. Basically get the output of console logs, read the last 100 lines and see if the app is doing something. If so, then you may be able to determine if the app is active. The biggest problem with this solution (besides trying to read logs on all your user's devices) is that this is not an instant solution and may require special privileges depending on the device you're working on. You would also probably need to setup a service that actively listens and reads the logs, which might cause some significant battery usage.

Upvotes: 4

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