CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidandroid-activityandroid-intent
Johnny
Johnny

Reputation: 2910

Android startActivity - What is happening

What is happening under the hood? somehow this is passed down to the OS, and someshow the OS will find the right activity / activities, and launch it? Is there a service / lib running in Android handling this? I am trying to modified the OS to override the logic of startActivity across the board, is this possible?

Thanks.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 545

Answers (3)

Paul Ratazzi
Paul Ratazzi

Reputation: 6397

Basically, when an app is first launched, startProcessLocked() in ActivityManagerService creates a new ProcessRecord (if necessary) and then calls Process.start(), which in turns builds the arguments for zygote and sends to zygote's socket using zygoteSendArgsAndGetResult(). Of course there's more to it than that, for example if an app shares a uid, is isolated, etc. But that gives you the basic process.

Looking over the source is indeed a good way to understand what's going on. However, unless you're planning on modifying it, don't bother downloading AOSP, just use GrepCode. Easier to browse, search and everything is hyperlinked so it's easy to follow through to classes, find usages, derived methods, etc. If you download AOSP, you'll be stuck with grep, ack-grep if you're lucky and a text editor. Also, you'll only have the one version you picked to checkout. GrepCode has the code for almost every version since 1.5.

The linked text above will take you to the relevant source at GrepCode. Try it out! The only downside is that GrepCode doesn't include the native C++ layer.

Upvotes: 1

Navin Ilavarasan
Navin Ilavarasan

Reputation: 1271

A good starting point might be ActivityManagerService

Upvotes: 0

user766650
user766650

Reputation:

I would take a look at the Android source! Whenever I'm developing and I run into an issue I read through the source to discover what is happening under the hood; it's quite interesting! It's an insight into what's actually going on, and also very good guidelines for documentation and code formatting!

http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html

Upvotes: 1

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