On Android, how to detect a system dialog is displayed (power options, recent apps, low battery…)?

Question

Hi Stackoverflowers (I know, that doesn\'t sound like it should...)

Well I think It\'s almost all in the question: I\'d like to catch anything that causes the displa

Answer 1

On working on a kiosk style app I know that some Dialogs come to the foreground and can be detected by

    ActivityManager activityManager = (ActivityManager)getBaseContext()
       .getSystemService(Activity.ACTIVITY_SERVICE);
    String className = activityManager.getRunningTasks(1).get(0).topActivity.getClassName();

An example for that is the bluetooth-binding dialog that brings the com.android.settings to the foreground.

A counter-example is the power-button dialog (Turn off, Reboot etc) that does not come to the foreground.

Note that you can close system dialogs (even the power-button dialog) with this broadcast:

    Intent closeDialog = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_CLOSE_SYSTEM_DIALOGS);
        sendBroadcast(closeDialog);

But on most (all newer?) devices this Broadcast will even close the software keyboard, so it is not advisable to have a service running that frequently sends it as the user will then be unable to enter anything into a text field.

Note that such behaviour will definetly gratify your app a status as beeing malware, keeping it from beeing published on google play.