Determining if an Activity exists on the current device?

Is there a way to check and see if an Activity exists on your device? If I have a youtube video link I want to specify it open in the YouTube PlayerActivity. However, I don't want to crash if for some reason they don't have it.

Is there a way to check and see if the activity exists? I don't think I can catch the runtime exception since startActivity() doesn't throw it.


Solution 1:

You could create an Intent object with necessary component info and then check if the intent is callable or not.I stumbled upon this snippet here on SO, don't have the link to the actual thread.

private boolean isCallable(Intent intent) {
        List<ResolveInfo> list = getPackageManager().queryIntentActivities(intent, 
            PackageManager.MATCH_DEFAULT_ONLY);
        return list.size() > 0;
}

Solution 2:

This is the simplest way to do this:

boolean activityExists = intent.resolveActivityInfo(getPackageManager(), 0) != null;

It is also the one recommended by Google:

To first verify that an app exists to receive the intent, call resolveActivity() on your Intent object. If the result is non-null, there is at least one app that can handle the intent and it's safe to call startActivity(). If the result is null, you should not use the intent and, if possible, you should disable the feature that invokes the intent.