New way to pin shortcut to Launcher - Wukong

If you have trouble pinning your custom shortcut to Launcher dynamically, try this library!

Demo in GitHub

中文文档点这里！

What's this library for?

Sometimes we need to customize some applications' shortcuts dynamically via code (for users, they just need to follow some steps, and finally pin a cute or beautiful shortcut to Launcher).

But in China, there are so many Launchers, which run on different ROMs. We need to make sure our feature can work perfectly on every of Launchers.

Also, there are some differences between older and newer Android Operating System, which is also annoying, though there is a Official tool called ShortcutManagerCompat. What I want to do is to provide a common method, so that others can pin their custom shortcuts onto the Launcher, without caring about the inner implementation, just as the XCompat Classes do.

How to use it?

It is pretty simple. the whole library just includes a Utility Class called Wukong and a Data Class called CustomShortcutInfo.

I recommend you to use CustomShortcutInfo to collect the installed application's info, so that you don't need to map a PackageInfo or something to CustomShortcutInfo.

CustomShortcutInfo

This Data Class is not that complicated. Its constructor needs at least 5 arguments and at most 7 arguments:

• originAppIconDrawable: The original app icon's drawable.
• originAppName: The original app's name.
• packageName: The app's package name.
• activityPkgName: The package name of the app's activity you want.
• activityClzName: The class name of the app's activity you want.
• action: (Optional) If you don't want to launch the Activity with Intent.ACTION_MAIN as action, set the action you want.
• category: (Optional) If you don't want to launch the Activity with Intent.CATEGORY_DEFAULT as category, set the category you want.*

Tips

• You can get origin app icon drawable by ApplicationInfo.loadIcon(PackageManager).
• You can get origin app name by ApplicationInfo.loadLabel(PackageManager)
• You can get app's package name by ApplicationInfo.getPackageName()
• If you don't change anything, the target activity includes Intent.ACTION_MAIN as action and Intent.CATEGORY_LAUNCHER as category. You can use PackageManager.queryIntentActivities(Intent, Int) to query all the activities that match.

Certainly, you can set a bitmap you like as your shortcut icon. When your bitmap is ready, just set customAppIconBmp to it;

What's more, if you want to change the shortcut's name, you can also set customAppName to the name you want;

On the devices which OS's version is under Android Oreo, you need to set shortcut duplicatable manually, which is true as default;

You can also change the flags of the Intent if you have needs.

Wukong

This Utility Class now have 2 public methods:

• isRequestPinShortcutSupported: Check whether we can set shortcut dynamically.
• requestPinShortcut: The main method to pin shortcut.

Those are pretty easy methods, I think you can understand how they work with the source code, so I won't talk too much about this class.

What's more...

If you find this article via GitHub, you might have seen, or even run the demo application already. I made a Compose project to show how Wukong works, and I take some Compose and MVI practice in MainActivity and IconSelectActivity. Hope you can learn something about Compose and MVI with these Activities and ViewModels.

Problems

• It's pretty funny to adapt devices under Android 8.0. You can check the details in 中文文档.
• On the devices whose OS's version is upper than and equal to Android Oreo may have a badge at the right-bottom of the shortcut icon. I'm trying to make it invisible...