Android Intent for Twitter application

This question is a bit older, but since I have just come across a similar problem, it may also still be of interest to others. First, as mentioned by Peter, create your intent:

Intent tweetIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
tweetIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "Test; please ignore");
tweetIntent.setType("application/twitter");

"application/twitter" is in fact a known content type, see here. Now, when you try to start an activity with this intent, it will show all sorts of apps that are not really Twitter clients, but want a piece of the action. As already mentioned in a couple of the "why do you even want to do that?" sort of answers, some users may find that useful. On the other hand, if I have a button in my app that says "Tweet this!", the user would very much expect this to bring up a Twitter client.

Which means that instead of just launching an activity, we need to filter out the ones that are appropriate:

PackageManager pm = getPackageManager();
List<ResolveInfo> lract 
= pm.queryIntentActivities(tweetIntent,
    PackageManager.MATCH_DEFAULT_ONLY);

boolean resolved = false;

for(ResolveInfo ri: lract)
{
    if(ri.activityInfo.name.endsWith(".SendTweet"))
    {
        tweetIntent.setClassName(ri.activityInfo.packageName,
                        ri.activityInfo.name);
        resolved = true;
        break;
    }
}

You would need to experiment a bit with the different providers, but if the name ends in ".SendTweet" you are pretty safe (this is the activity name in Twidroyd). You can also check your debugger for package names you want to use and adjust the string comparison accordingly (i.e. Twidroyd uses "com.twidroid.*").

In this simple example we just pick the first matching activity that we find. This brings up the Twitter client directly, without the user having to make any choices. If there are no proper Twitter clients, we revert to the standard activity chooser:

startActivity(resolved ? tweetIntent :
    Intent.createChooser(tweetIntent, "Choose one"));

You could expand the code and take into account the case that there is more than one Twitter client, when you may want to create your own chooser dialog from all the activity names you find.

It is entirely possible your users will only ever, now and forever, only want to post to Twitter.

I would think that it is more likely that your users want to send information to people, and Twitter is one possibility. But, they might also want to send a text message, or an email, etc.

In that case, use ACTION_SEND, as described here. Twidroid, notably, supports ACTION_SEND, so it will appear in the list of available delivery mechanisms.

Nope. The intent type is something like image/png or application/pdf, i.e. a file type, and with createChooser you're basically asking which apps can open this file type.

Now, there's no such thing as an application/twitter file that can be opened, so that won't work. I'm not aware of any other way you can achieve what you want either.

From http://twidroid.com/plugins/

Twidroid’s ACTION_SEND intent

Intent sendIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND); 
sendIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "This is a sample message via Public Intent"); 
sendIntent.setType("application/twitter");   
startActivity(Intent.createChooser(sendIntent, null));