Differentiating between an Activity launch from home screen or from another activity from App

Question

I need to know a generic way to distinguish between a call of activity from launcher and a call from another activity from inside my app, or a BACK on the activity stack

Answer 1

In the onCreate of your Activity, call getIntent(). If the Activity is started from the launcher (home screen) the values for getAction() will be android.intent.action.MAIN and the getCategories() will return a set which will contain the android.intent.category.LAUNCHER category. If the activity is started from elsewhere these values may be null.