Android Application Fundamentals: Intents (e.g. adding printing to your Android app)

Some printer vendors make photo printing application freely available in Google’s Android Marketplace. Those applications allow printing of photos from an Android phone to a nearby printer and currently, only photos stored in the Android Gallery (a folder on the SDCard) can be printed. However, there are many great Android applications available that work with photos that are not kept in the Android Gallery, e.g. Flickr or Picasa Photo viewing application, gathering content from the cloud.

Android’s open architectures allows applications to temporarily transfer control to other installed applications, to perform certain tasks. I’m going to show how to enable printing in your Android applications, by re-using intents, implemented in other apps. If such intents can be found on a device, we will programmatically walk the user through its installation process, which would happen through the Android Marketplace.