We are using intents to switch from one of our apps to another on request, typically a button that is pressed. That way our apps present themselves as a functional unit to the user. We switch back by means of results we hand back.
Recently we implemented a switch that is not triggered by an immediate user interaction, but by an implicit event. When navigating inside one app we use an activity from another app as a drop-in-replacement for some feature in the first app. So the first app sends the user to the second app if it detects that second app is installed.
I realize we have an issue here: if that second app is buggy, crashes, then the first app is broken. Since it switches to the second back again and again without the user being able to alter that behavior. So apparently it makes sense to enable the first app to realize that the second app just crashed. So that it would not switch over next time, although that second app is indeed installed.
This does not work out of the box, since the first app never is informed about the crash of the second app. Instead that app crashes, the OS hint comes app ("Unfortunately XY just crshed") and that's it. The flow never returns to the first app, so there is no return value to evaluate or similar.
So my question is: how can I enable the first app to learn about the fact that the second app just crashed?
I thought about registering a global handler for uncaught exceptions in the second app. That handler would have to somehow signal to the first app that it is currently crashing. Either by sending a specific intent itself (sounds ugly) or by handing back a result (is that possible at all?).
Is there a common practice for this? What is it? What other options exist? Or is that question itself obsolete, since I only failed to see how this is meant to be done?
UPDATE:
Interesting enough I learend that this actually works if the crash in that second app is raised not upon startup but much later ... In that case indeed the first app is in foreground again and is indeed able to detect the crash: the result is "CANCELED" in that case, which is perfectly fine for me.
The the question is reduced to "early crashes" and how this can be handled. Or, the other way round: what is the difference between early and later crashes in that second app?