Calling my app from a MIME type in Android

It seems like this is something that people might want to be able to easily do. But, surprisingly enough when I google this, I get a lot of posts with people saying, "How do I have my app get called when the browser reads a certain MIME type?"

Here is your answer.

It is really fairly simple. In fact, most of what you need to know is included in the Notepad sample app on the Android SDK site! But, there are some minor details missing.


If you follow what is available on the Android SDK site, you would add a new <intent-filter> to your manifest, that would look something like this :

     <intent-filter>
          <action:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
          <category:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
          <data:mimetype="testtype/testtype" />
     </intent-filter>

Then, you just need to have a web server that can serve up our "testtype/testtype" MIME type to make it work, right?

Well, to test that theory, I hacked up this cute little piece of PHP, and stuck it on a local web server :

<?php

        header("Content-type: testtype/testtype");

        echo("Testing!");
?>

Note : Your web server will have to be able to run PHP for this to work! You are on your own to figure that out.


I named this PHP script test.php, and dropped it in the root share for my web server. Then, I pulled up the Android browser, and went to the web page : <myserver>/test.php .

What happened, was underwhelming to say the least. The phone downloaded a file called test.php. If I then tapped on the file name, it would start my application. So, I knew I was close.


After more digging around, I discovered the magical incantation. The MIME type line needs to know that we want to look specifically for things downloaded via http. So, I made a small change to my manifest file. The MIME type line now looks like this :

          <data:mimetype="testtype/testtype" scheme="http">

Then, I ran the same test again, and my application was now loaded when I attempted to pull up the .php script that issued the testtype MIME type.