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Using Intents to Create Flows

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Nathan Esquenazi edited this page Aug 16, 2013 · 55 revisions

Overview

Intent is a powerful concept within the Android universe. An intent is a message that can be thought of as a request that is given to either an activity within your own app, an external application, or a built-in Android service.

Think of an intent as a way for an Activity to communicate with the outside Android world. A few common tasks that an intent might be used for:

  • Take the user to another screen (activity) within your application
  • Take the user to a particular URL within the Android web browser
  • Take the user to the camera to have them take a picture
  • Initiate a call for the user to a given number

As you can see, the Intent is a core part of user flows in Android development. The Intent object itself is a class that represents a particular "request" including the topic of the request and any request "parameters" which are called the Bundle.

References

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