I want to write an Android App that analyses chats. For each messenger, for each contact, I want to get a list of all messages sent and received (since installing my app). The key thing here, is that I want the list of messages to be in order. My app should support as many messengers as possible. What would be the best way to do this?
I researched and found a few ways to access messengers' messages:
Using accessibility services
(Related: How to read window content (using accessibilityService) and evoking UI using draw over other app permission in Android?)
to read the screen content of other apps that is annotated with accessibility labels
caveats:
the messenger needs to have accessibility implemented correctly
I have to filter which text blobs are relevant
Using NotificationListenerService
to get the content of notifications for received messages
caveats:
only gets content of messages for which there was a notification
except for their time, there is no order of the messages given
taking screenshots and doing optical character recognition
caveats:
probably insane
When I get the messages, I still have to order them. For this, I think, the accessibility services are my best bet as I could use the date information on screen in most messages, and also their position on the screen.
However, there is still an edge case. As I understand it, accessibility services can only see the content currently on the screen. The user might also use another device to chat while the device with the app installed is powered off. Thus, once the device with the app installed is powered on again, the app might not be able to see the old messages written while the device was powered off (until the user scrolls up again).
Are my assumptions correct? Do you know of a better way for my app to read/sort the messages?
Related
TL;DR: My app is hogging the user's microphone. Can I turn it off automatically whenever another app needs to use the mic?
I have an Android app that has some really cool microphone functionality, similar to Amazon Alexa, that stays on all the time in a background service. The problem is, my app hogs the users' microphone, making it unusable:
However, this is terrible application behavior on my behalf, and I want to do my best to avoid it. Is it possible to be notified when another application requests to use the microphone, so that I can automatically stop my service?
PS: I am using the Pocketsphinx library for continuous background voice recognition.
This is tricky, as I'm not a ware of any API for this. This surely will require system-level APIs to work like an "Ok Google" type of thing.
A viable option would be (from https://stackoverflow.com/a/43623308/603270) to run a Job at regular intervals, checking for foreground apps using android.permission.PACKAGE_USAGE_STATS.
This might suffice. But you could also add things regarding phone calls (how to detect phone call broadcast receiver in android) using android.intent.action.PHONE_STATE or media playback (via Receiver or maybe even MediaPlayer directly).
If you're really wanting to get this thing working, an alternative would be to get an array list of all installed apps on the system and which ones require permission to use the mic or not, then use an accessibility service to monitor the users screen if an app the user just opened requires the mic (which you'll know from the array you just grabbed). From there, disable the mic in your app if their app needs the mic. The background service can then check in intervals of, say, two minutes, to see if the app that required the mic is still open. This is really inefficient. But if you don't care, then this might be a good option.
There is no standard way to inform another app that you want access to the microphone (so that they release the resources and let you access it). You could however send a broadcast to all other apps ("requesting the microphone"), but the other apps would have to implement this feature (and very few or zero developers will do this).
I would recommend you to simply inform the user that the microphone is currently not available, because you can't do anything else.
The Android TV (ATV) app I'm working on has voice control capabilities. Basically, when the user presses the microphone button on a remote controller, the key event (identified by KeyEvent.KEYCODE_SEARCH) is handled by the app, speech recognition starts (using android.speech.SpeechRecognizer), the results (parsed speech) are obtained and parsed further by the app logic (e.g. showing the user search results or performing some in-app action).
Everything has been working as intended and described above, until, quite recently, Google Assistant (GA) was introduced to ATV platforms (the first one being Nvidia Shield box). Now, when the RCU mic button is pressed, the GA overlay appears and the mic key event doesn't even reach the app.
For the last few days I've done some extensive research (documentation, internet, forums, stackoverflow etc.) and experimented with some potential workarounds, but nothing's worked so far and I haven't been able to find any definite information on the topic (probably due to the ATV+GA combination being rather new on the scene, and the ATV ecosystem not being as large as the Android one).
The best hint I got so far is what's been done with the Spotify app for Android TV. When it's run on an ATV device with no GA, it basically behaves as I described above; but when GA is present, the GA overlay appears, receives the parsed speech and shows the search results, with results from Spotify in the first line - so, the Spotify app is integrated with GA, and this integration replaces the in-app voice control mechanism. This suggests that either there is no way to ignore/disable GA inside your app in order to receive the mic key event and proceed with voice control as usual, or at least this is the preferred way of handling voice commands now. It also shows that there are apps for ATV that approach voice control the way I described, so maybe someone here has already encountered similar problem.
My question(s):
is it possible to prevent Google Assistant from taking over RCU mic button signal?
is it ok to do so? (by "not ok" I would mean - are there any official guidelines that discourage such behavior - or at least are there valid reasons not to do so?)
if so, can it be done?
if not, is there a resource documenting how to integrate with GA (the way Spotify for ATV app does)?
Starting with your last question:
if not, is there a resource documenting how to integrate with GA (the way Spotify for ATV app does)?
I wrote about how to integrate on the Android Developer's Blog. Spotify has onboarded their content catalog to Google's services which is why the Google Assistant is able to work so well. You can achieve similar results if you make your app searchable (covered in the blog).
is it possible to prevent Google Assistant from taking over RCU mic button signal?
No, not at this time. The Google Assistant is a system app that takes control over the mic to give a uniform experience across all apps.
is it ok to do so? (by "not ok" I would mean - are there any official guidelines that discourage such behavior - or at least are there valid reasons not to do so?)
if so, can it be done?
You can still have an in-app search experience. There is an example in the leanback sample. You will need to set a listener on a BrowseFragment and implement a SearchFragment. We know this can be confusing, have in-app search and Google Assistant search competing, but we are working on how to improve this.
I want to create an app to consume real time data from an API. This API give me information about different temperatures. When a certain temperature is exceeded my app need to notify the event to the user.
This app need to run in Android and a web browser. So, my problem is the architecture... My app need to be a websocket or a REST API?
Any help is appreciated!!
You need a notification service, and google has something like that for us...
how does this works??
Take a look at the image below,
you need to register your android app in the google service, and your web interface will need an id, so everytime you want to push something to the android, your web interface instead will push it to the google server with the Id of the app, then google (no matter how) will localize your app, and even if its not running, they will get the notification,
behind the scenes there is a couple of thing that you must do, bu nothing like launching rockets from the NASA.
I will suggest to take a look to some tutorials
in order to start with the registration of your app, get the api key etc etc..
In addition to what #Xoce showed, Amazon has the SNS service which will push notifications to you. Or, if you application is a web based application inside of a native (i.e. Cordova), I've used PubNub for JavaScript based events.
A word of caution though - you'll need to define "real time" for your application. There will be a slight latency between the event and what your application sees no matter what stack you choose. When I think real time I think in terms of microseconds of delay. You may have seconds of delay. If this is a "hey, your house temperature is above a threshold" type of application then that is fine. If this is "hey, your nuclear reactor temperature is above a threshold" then this may not be the way to go.
I am working on an app that scans your messages and presents interesting statistics about your contacts. Right now I have it running on my laptop scanning an iPhone SMS database. I want to create an app that will allow people to scan their own messages from their phone. I know this is not possible on iPhone so I am focussing on Android. Here are the kinds of stats we are calculating:
http://cl.ly/460S3y3Q3F200o1W2X0Y
I have read this answer:
How can I read SMS messages from the device programmatically in Android?
But just wanted to double-check that it is still possible to access the messages on Android phones from within an Android app.
Is that possible?
Thanks!
There is no publicly available API on Android SDK that allows you to read the user's SMS messages from within an app.
As you've found, there are ways in which you can obtain the information using unofficial / undocumented calls. Google themselves do not recommend you do this, because it's not guaranteed to work across all phones, or all versions of Android.
So to answer your question: yes, it's technically possible, but probably ill-advised if you're looking to publish your app and have it work successfully across all devices.
I have an application (however I'm testing using the sample bluetooth chat from the SDK) where two android devices connects each other, and exchange data.
I already have part of the pairing process hardcoded using the BT address, problem is: the dialog it appears to confirm the pin. Is there a way to make that work programmatically? The only thing that "appeared" to solve my problem was in this question, but that API is completely abandoned, has no documentation and many issues.
As fair as I know the problem is that if the device is not the device database with paired devices, without root access the standard API is always going to prompt the user, but I'm still wondering if there's a way.
Bluetooth autopairing is defined only for some devices. To change this you should rewrite Android framework. So, from the application, it seems to me, this is impossible to do.