A quick Android app wrapper

or: How I made Google Assistant work with the Bixby Button

Honestly, I’m not fully sure why you would want to do it but I guess it has it’s uses because here I am writing this. Anyhow, if you need to write an Android application who’s sole use is to launch another application, here is how you can go about it:

1. Create a project in Android Studio and use the Empty Activity template to add an activity. Make sure this activity is the launcher activity.
2. In your AndroidManifest.xml file, find your <activity ../> definition and add the following theme attribute: android:theme="@android:style/Theme.NoDisplay". This will prevent the Activity from popping into view when the application starts.
3. Lastly, add some code into your onCreate function to start the other app and then just quit. To launch Google Assistant you can use (in Kotlin):

startActivity(Intent(Intent.ACTION_VOICE_COMMAND).setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK or FLAG_ACTIVITY_EXCLUDE_FROM_RECENTS))
System.exit(0)

And that’s it.

If you’re using Nova you can hide the app so you don’t have to look at it.