These are used to start an application component within your control–a class or activity to which you have access. If you’re developing a multi-activity application, you will likely use a lot of explicit Intents.
Intents come in two types: explicit and implicit. Further on in the documentation, it gives the more approachable description that “ most significant use is in the launching of activities, where it can be thought of as the glue between activities.” Okay, that makes more sense and explains why they seem to be involved in so many things. Android’s official documentation defines an Intent as “an abstract description of an operation to be performed”…helpful.
Let’s start out by getting a baseline definition. My goal with this post is to share what I have learned about these powerful abstractions and to provide a useful and interesting example in the process. However, after doing this a few times myself, my lack of understanding kept nagging me to dig deeper. It is all too easy to copy-paste a few lines from a StackOverflow answer and never come back to it because things seem to just work. This may be because Intents tend to work quite smoothly when used in the right circumstances. Until recently, all I knew about them was that they were used in everything from navigation within an application to media playback and interacting with external applications.ĭespite the many uses of Intents, I never ran across a great explanation of their purpose until I dug into the Android documentation. Intents show up pretty regularly in the official Android tutorials and frequently appear in StackOverflow answers. If you have spent much time with Android development, you have likely run across Android’s Intent object.
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