Question

I am new to android development and and I want to setup some of application’s attributes based on Application first run after installation. Is there any way to find that the application is running for the first time and then to setup its first run attributes?

Answer 1

The following is an example of using SharedPreferences to achieve a ‘first run’ check.

public class MyActivity extends Activity {

    SharedPreferences prefs = null;

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        // Perhaps set content view here

        prefs = getSharedPreferences("com.mycompany.myAppName", MODE_PRIVATE);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onResume() {
        super.onResume();

        if (prefs.getBoolean("firstrun", true)) {
            // Do first run stuff here then set 'firstrun' as false
            // using the following line to edit/commit prefs
            prefs.edit().putBoolean("firstrun", false).commit();
        }
    }
}

When the code runs prefs.getBoolean(...) if there isn’t a boolean saved in SharedPreferences with the key “firstrun” then that indicates the app has never been run (because nothing has ever saved a boolean with that key or the user has cleared the app data in order to force a ‘first run’ scenario). If this isn’t the first run then the line prefs.edit().putBoolean("firstrun", false).commit(); will have been executed and therefore prefs.getBoolean("firstrun", true) will actually return false as it overrides the default true provided as the second parameter.