The Intent Class

An intent is a class. Intents, in the Android platform, make up the major communication protocol for moving information between application components. In a well-designed Android application, components (activity, content provider, or service) should never directly access an instance of any other component. As such, intents are how these pieces are able to communicate.

A good half of this book could be dedicated to the creation, use, and details of the Intent class. For the sake of brevity and getting you up and running as fast as possible, I’ll cover only a few basics in this chapter. Look for intents throughout the rest of this book. They’re probably the most often used class in Android as a whole.

There are two main ways to tell the Android system that you’d like to receive intents sent out by the system, by other applications, or even by your own app: