Android- Is it possible to make an app change another app? If so how?

Question

I'm developing a photo manipulation app and am wondering if there is a way to have something come up for my app after the user takes an image of a picture (by somehow changing the camera app). Another example of something like what I want to do would be something like changing the calender app to also put in a location and use GPS to find directions to that location. Is there a way to do this? If so how?

Answer 1

If you want direction of a location, you need to use Google Maps API (or similar), not GPS. To put stuff into Google Calendar, look at their API as well.

Answer 2

I don't know if you can change the app itself, but you can definitely integrate your application with another android applications. There are several examples that can show you how to acess the camera app to take a picture and return this picture to your app for manipulation, or accessing a picture from your gallery (take a look in Intent class, and you can use it with startActivityonResult, and on onActivityResult, inside your activity, you manipulate the picture). Hope that helps

Answer 3

As I understand from your question, you want your app to appear when the user takes a photo using the native camera app. Although that's possible (not saying it's easy), a better solution would be to launch the camera intent from YOUR app (or display what the camera sees in a SurfaceView), and use it as you wish. You wouldn't want to change the default behavior of built-in apps in the system, and users will thank you for not doing so.

There are countless tutorials out there that teaches you how to make use of built-in apps' functionalities for your own. As an example, here 's an SO thread that teaches how to use the built-in camera to take a picture, and use the resulting data in your app.