Question

I’m writing an application where I’d like to offer the user the option to remap the hardware camera button to do some other function. However if the device does not have a hardware camera button I’d like to hide this option.

Is there any way to detect the presence of the camera button on a device?

Answer 1

Unfortunately I don’t think it’s possible. The PackageManager class can you give you information about different things, but whether there’s a hard camera button is not one of them. You can do things like:

boolean hasCamera = 
        getPackageManager().hasSystemFeature(PackageManager.FEATURE_CAMERA);

But unfortunately, there’s nothing like PackageManager.FEATURE_CAMERA_BUTTON

What you could do however is hard code in a bunch of checks for specific devices that you know to have hardware camera buttons, eg.

public boolean hasCameraButton() {
if(android.os.Build.MODEL.equals("droid1")) return true;
//more code here
}

where droid1 should be the actual id.. i dunno what it is