Android and Facebook share intent

Question

I\'m developing an Android app and am interested to know how you can update the app user\'s status from within the app using Android\'s share intents.

Having looked

Answer 1

The usual way

The usual way to create what you're asking for, is to simply do the following:

    Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
    intent.setType("text/plain");
    intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "The status update text");
    startActivity(Intent.createChooser(intent, "Dialog title text"));

This works without any issues for me.

The alternative way (maybe)

The potential problem with doing this, is that you're also allowing the message to be sent via e-mail, SMS, etc. The following code is something I'm using in an application, that allows the user to send me an e-mail using Gmail. I'm guessing you could try to change it to make it work with Facebook only.

I'm not sure how it responds to any errors or exceptions (I'm guessing that would occur if Facebook is not installed), so you might have to test it a bit.

    try {
        Intent emailIntent = new Intent(android.content.Intent.ACTION_SEND);
        String[] recipients = new String[]{"e-mail address"};
        emailIntent.putExtra(android.content.Intent.EXTRA_EMAIL, recipients);
        emailIntent.putExtra(android.content.Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, "E-mail subject");
        emailIntent.putExtra(android.content.Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "E-mail text");
        emailIntent.setType("plain/text"); // This is incorrect MIME, but Gmail is one of the only apps that responds to it - this might need to be replaced with text/plain for Facebook
        final PackageManager pm = getPackageManager();
        final List matches = pm.queryIntentActivities(emailIntent, 0);
        ResolveInfo best = null;
        for (final ResolveInfo info : matches)
            if (info.activityInfo.packageName.endsWith(".gm") ||
                    info.activityInfo.name.toLowerCase().contains("gmail")) best = info;
                if (best != null)
                    emailIntent.setClassName(best.activityInfo.packageName, best.activityInfo.name);
                startActivity(emailIntent);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        Toast.makeText(this, "Application not found", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
    }