Question

I’d like to know if there’s a way to open a file browser (system or 3rd party like Astro) to a specific path. There’s not much else to say here… pretty straight-forward question.

Answer 1

Sounds like ACTION_GET_CONTENT is what you want. See here. The relevant bits would be:

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_GET_CONTENT);
intent.setType("file/*");
startActivityForResult(intent,PICKFILE_RESULT_CODE);

On my phone (which has astro already installed), this brings up an astro dialog for /sdcard. I’m not sure what this will do on a phone with no file browser installed. I’m also unsure about whether you are able to actually specify the starting path using this method. The docs make it sound like you can’t specify a starting uri for ACTION_GET_CONTENT.

EDIT: I think I understand the question better now. I thought you were wanting a picker style browser to just get a file path from the user. If you want a full blown browser to handle your uri, then this worked for me:

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
intent.setDataAndType(Uri.parse("file:///mnt/sdcard/Music"), "*/*");
startActivity(intent);

That will probably give you quite a long list of possible handlers, but I’d bet any file manager on the system would be in the list (astro certainly is).