How to open the Samsung native gallery without having an error toast?

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I want to open the phone's gallery using a button from my application. I'm using something like this:

goToGalleryButton.setOnClickListener {
  val intent = Intent()
  intent.action = Intent.ACTION_VIEW
  intent.type = "image/*"
  intent.flags = Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK
  startActivity(intent)
}

After pressing the button, a pop-up for choosing the desired application appears. If I choose the Google Photos application everything is good and I can see all the images and videos as I want, but if I choose the Samsung's gallery I get a toast with "Unsupported file" error message.

Something similar happens on Huawei devices on choosing the native gallery application.

Is there a way to avoid that error message when opening the native gallery app?

android-gallery android-intent android
1 Answers

if I choose the Samsung's gallery I get a toast with "Unsupported file" error message

Sure. Your Intent is broken:

  • ACTION_VIEW takes a Uri of the content to be viewed — you are not including that
  • ACTION_VIEW takes a concrete MIME type of that content — you are using a wildcard

You are assuming that the developers of apps capable of viewing images will "gracefully degrade" when they receive a flawed Intent. That happens to be the case for Google Photos, apparently. It will not be the case in general.

I want to open the phone's gallery using a button from my application

I am interpreting this as meaning that you want to do the same thing as would happen if the user tapped the launcher icon for that app. If so:

  • Create an Intent for ACTION_MAIN and CATEGORY_LAUNCHER
  • Add a selector Intent to that one, where the selector will help constrain which apps are used for the chooser

Probably CATEGORY_APP_GALLERY will be the right category to use for the selector Intent.

You can combine all of that using makeMainSelectorActivity():

val intent = Intent.makeMainSelectorActivity(Intent.ACTION_MAIN, Intent.CATEGORY_APP_GALLERY)
  .addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK)
user_1151450
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