Question

How can you update an AccessibilityService in real time to update it’s properties from an Activity?

I have written and AccessibilityService and I want to call the method “setServiceInfo()” within that service. How can you accomplish this?

Answer 1

I found out how to do this in a different way:

I set this service’s settings in the service when it’s created like this:

/**
 * Set the info/data for this accessibility service.
 */
public void setServiceInfo(){
    AccessibilityServiceInfo accessibilityServiceInfo = new AccessibilityServiceInfo();
    //We only want notification event types.
    accessibilityServiceInfo.eventTypes = AccessibilityEvent.TYPE_NOTIFICATION_STATE_CHANGED;
    //We want to provide specific type of feedback.
    accessibilityServiceInfo.feedbackType = AccessibilityServiceInfo.FEEDBACK_GENERIC;
    //We want to receive events in a certain interval.
    accessibilityServiceInfo.notificationTimeout = 100;
    accessibilityServiceInfo.packageNames = null;
    super.setServiceInfo(accessibilityServiceInfo);
}

Basically, I was looking for a way to update the “packageNames” property in real time to filter the packages that this service would respond to. I was unable to find out if that was possible so I instead set this property to null and then filter the packages based on the event that was sent to this service. In real time I check the event package against my DB of packages to respond to. I hope someone else finds this helpful.