Get list of installed android applications
I was working on something like this recently. One thing I'll say up front is to be sure and perform this in a separate thread -- querying the application information is SLOW. The following will get you a list of ALL the installed applications. This will include a lot of system apps that you probably aren't interested in.
PackageManager pm = getPackageManager();List<ApplicationInfo> apps = pm.getInstalledApplications(0);
To limit it to just the user-installed or updated system apps (e.g. Maps, GMail, etc), I used the following logic:
List<ApplicationInfo> installedApps = new ArrayList<ApplicationInfo>();for(ApplicationInfo app : apps) { //checks for flags; if flagged, check if updated system app if((app.flags & ApplicationInfo.FLAG_UPDATED_SYSTEM_APP) != 0) { installedApps.add(app); //it's a system app, not interested } else if ((app.flags & ApplicationInfo.FLAG_SYSTEM) != 0) { //Discard this one //in this case, it should be a user-installed app } else { installedApps.add(app); }}
EDIT: Also, to get the name and icon for the app (which is probably what takes the longest -- I haven't done any real deep inspection on it -- use this:
String label = (String)pm.getApplicationLabel(app);Drawable icon = pm.getApplicationIcon(app);
installedApps should have a full list of the apps you need, now. Hope this helps, but you may have to modify the logic a bit depending on what apps you need to have returned. Again, it is SLOW, but it's just something you have to work around. You might want to build a data cache in a database if it's something you'll be accessing frequently.