Detect home button press in android

Question

This has been driving me nuts for a while now.

Is there any way of reliably detecting if the home button has been pressed in an android application?

Failing

Answer 1

I had this problem, and since overriding the onKeyDown() method didn't accomplish anything because of the underlying android system didn't call this method, I solved this with overriding onBackPressed(), and I had a boolean value set there to false, because I pressed back, let me show you what I mean in code:

import android.util.Log;
public class HomeButtonActivity extends Activity {
    boolean homePressed = false;
    // override onCreate() here.

    @Override
    public void onBackPressed() {
        homePressed = false; // simply set homePressed to false
    }

    @Overide
    public void onResume() {
        super.onResume();
        homePressed = true; // default: other wise onBackPressed will set it to false
    }

    @Override
    public void onPause() {
        super.onPause();
        if(homePressed) { Log.i("homePressed", "yay"); }
    }

So the reason why this worked is because the only way to navigate outside this activity is by pressing back or home so if back was pressed then i know the cause wasn't home, but otherwise the cause was home, therefore i set the default boolean value for homePressed to be true. However this will only work with a single activity instance in your application because otherwise you have more possibilities to cause the onPause() method to be called.