Question

I want to develop an application (or service) that will count the number of times I open http://www.google.com url. But I do not know if this is possible with Android.

I want to do a research on this field but I do not know how to start. As far I was looking, there is no intent fired when some uri in the browser is oppened, but I guess there is so way to do this. I do not expect to be simple but I hope it is possible. My hope is the fact that some applications measure the network traffic, meaning everything is somehow tracked.

Answer 1

This isn’t guaranteed to work across all flavours of Android, but according to the documentation you can read the browser database.

Browser is a static helper that provides access to the bookmarks database and, handily for your requirements, also exposes browser history via a method called getAllVisitedUrls.

Cursor cursor=Browser.getAllVisitedUrls(getContentResolver());
        cursor.moveToFirst();
        int occasions=0;
        while (cursor.moveToNext()) {
            String urlVisited=cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(BookmarkColumns.URL));
            if (urlVisited.contains("www.google.")) {
                occasions++;
            }
            Log.d("History",cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(BookmarkColumns.URL)));
        }
        Log.d("History","occasions="+occasions);

EDIT: Sorry to update this after it’s been accepted as an answer, but contrary to what I initially wrote you can indeed register to listen for changes to the bookmarks URI:

getContentResolver().registerContentObserver(Browser.BOOKMARKS_URI, true, 
            new ContentObserver(new Handler()) {

                    @Override
                    public void onChange(boolean selfChange) {
                        Log.d("History","Bookmarks has changed");
                        super.onChange(selfChange);
                    }

        });

I hope that’s helpful.

EDIT: I neglected to mention that you need to add a permission to your manifest: com.android.browser.permission.READ_HISTORY_BOOKMARKS