Creating an Android App Launcher

A concrete example of Kotlin + MVVM + Data Binding + AAC

I was recently tasked to research how to enable customers running an app in kiosk mode to still be able to leverage other secondary apps on their devices. The goal was not to integrate these secondary apps with the primary app via an SDK or inter-process communication, but rather just to simply be able to launch these secondary apps from the primary app.

It is probably worthwhile to first explain what I mean by “kiosk mode”. When an app is run in kiosk mode, the user is unable to exit the app. The screen is always on. The app is always in the foreground. The notification bar is usually hidden or disabled and almost always the Home button is disabled. This effectively makes it so that the user of the app must always remain within just that one app. So with that understanding you can probably now see the need for a means to launch approved secondary apps from the “primary” app.

Launching other apps on Android from your app is not in itself terribly challenging. There are plenty of code snippets online for how this can be accomplished. However, what is not so easy to find is a concrete example of how to implement a feature such as this while also adhering to the principles that Google is recommending for new Android development such as writing the…