Question

i’m programming an android app, a Tasker, and i really don’t find the way to obtain the label of another app. This is my point, i’m using an ListActivity where you select an installed app, then when you click it creates the Intent and all the app stuff, what i wanna do is to show to the user the android:label from the app he selected, i found in ResolverInfo an attribute called .activityInfo.labelRes, and i think is the label descriptor for the R class of the app the user selected, is there anyway to obtain the string that matches to that id???
Thanks!
D.Gómez

Answer 1

You can use the loadLabel(PackageManager) method of ResolveInfo to get the label of an activity. Here’s a full example which finds all the launcher activities on the device and prints them to logcat:

// Get the package manager
PackageManager pm = getPackageManager();
// Create an intent that matches all launcher activities
// (and ignores non-launcher activities)
Intent launcherIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_MAIN);
launcherIntent.addCategory(Intent.CATEGORY_LAUNCHER);

// Get all activites matching the intent
List<ResolveInfo> launchers = pm.queryIntentActivities(launcherIntent, 0);

for(ResolveInfo info : launchers) {
  // Get the activity label and print it
  CharSequence label = info.loadLabel(pm);
  Log.v("LabelTest", "App found: " + label);
}

To answer the second part of your question too, about accessing the resources of an application: They can be accessed by calling getPackageManager().getResourcesForApplication(String), which will return a Resources object that you can use, though in your case, that should not be necessary.