An Intent in the
Android operating system
Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open-source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android is developed by a consortium of deve ...
is a
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
mechanism that allows
users to coordinate the functions of different activities to achieve a task. An Intent is a messaging object which provides a facility for performing
late runtime binding between the code in different applications in the Android
development environment
In software deployment, an environment or tier is a computer system or set of systems in which a computer program or software component is deployed and executed. In simple cases, such as developing and immediately executing a program on the same m ...
. Its most significant use is in the launching of activities, where it can be thought of as the glue between activities: Intents provide an inter-application messaging system that encourages collaboration and
component reuse In computer programming, a third-party software component is a reusable software component developed to be either freely distributed or sold by an entity other than the original vendor of the development platform. The third-party software component ...
.
[Felt, A. P., Chin, E., Hanna, S., Song, D., & Wagner, D. (2011, October). Android permissions demystified. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security (pp. 627-638). ACM.]
An Intent is basically a
passive data structure holding an
abstract description of an action to be performed.
[Android API](_blank)
retrieved 23-Jul-2013 ''For Dummies'' likens an Intent to flicking a switch: "Your intent is to turn on the light, and to do so, you perform the action of flipping the switch to the On position."
Description
The concept was created as a way to allow developers to easily remix different apps and allow each type of
task (called ''activity'') to be handled by the application best suited to it, even if provided by a third party. Although the concept was not new, the Android architecture doesn't require
elevated privilege
In computing, privilege is defined as the delegation of authority to perform security-relevant functions on a computer system. A privilege allows a user to perform an action with security consequences. Examples of various privileges include the ab ...
s to access the components, which makes it an
open platform.
Activities in Android are defined as classes that control the life cycle of a task in the user interface. The activities supported by an application are declared in a
manifest, so that other applications can read what activities are supported. Intents in one application can start particular activities in a different application, if the latter supports the message type of the Intent.
An analysis in 2011 by researchers from
The University of California at Berkeley found that Intents can pose a
security risk, allowing attackers to read content in messages and to insert malicious messages between applications.
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References
{{Reflist
Android (operating system)
Inter-process communication