Question

I need my activity to handle HOME button press with a
receiver programmatically, but the event is not firing. I can,
however, successfully register and capture this intent filter if I
declare it in a manifest.xml activity section. Here’s the code for
the receiver that’s not working:

BroadcastReceiver br;

br = new BroadcastReceiver() {
       @Override
       public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
               return;  // I put a breakpoint here to see if this gets called
       }
};


IntentFilter intf = new IntentFilter();
intf.addAction(Intent.ACTION_MAIN);
intf.addCategory(Intent.CATEGORY_HOME);
intf.addCategory(Intent.CATEGORY_DEFAULT);

registerReceiver(br, intf);

Does anyone know why this doesn’t capture the home button click?

By the way, I tried working around this by creating another activity
and specifying its intent filter in the manifest. I set the activity
enabled=”false” in the manifest but I couldn’t figure out how to
enable that activity at run time. Bottom line, I only want to
register the home button intent filter for my application only when my
application is running, and I can’t figure out how to do that.

Answer 1

If you are trying to implement a replacement home screen, you need your Intent filter to be in the manifest — see the Home sample app in the SDK.

If you are trying to block the HOME key, please don’t.