Have you ever been in a situation where you wished you could have a transparent/invisible activity. May be the next killer spy app or probably a screen monitoring or recording app? Well guess what you are in luck ! In this tutorial I will be showing you how to create a transparent activity in Android. So lets see how we can create our hidden/invisible Activity.
All the magic is going to happen through a simple XML file, the styles.xml in your res folder(if the file already exists then just add the new style at the end) :
That's it, now you just need to apply this to the Activity which you want to be transparent in the AndroidManifest.xml
Congratulations, you now have a transparent activity ready for your spying app! So now whenever you start this activity the user won't see any UI as it is completely invisible. You can now perform any actions in the MainActivity.java and the user wont even know that there is something happening.
That's all great but with great power comes great responsibility, so there are two things which you need to make sure as an efficient Android developer :
1. Our transparent activity is still registering touches, so the user is going to be pissed at you if he can't see your activity but his touches don't get registered on the screen. So we would want to make our app to stop listening for touch events so that the user's touches are registered on the visible UI screen.
This is pretty simple as well, all we need to do is add a single line of code in our MainActivity.java
Basically what that does is, it tells Android to stop registering Touch Events for this activity. Now the user can click the screen as normal without even knowing that your activity is is there spying on him. :P
2. I would not recommend the use of this unless absolutely necessary because since the activity is invisible it will be running and hogging the resources from the device. You can call the finish() method but even after that the app will be in the background consuming resource until the OS kills it. So please make sure you use this only if absolutely necessary and there is no other way of achieving what you want.
That's all from my end, feel free to drop me a comment below if you have any queries !
All the magic is going to happen through a simple XML file, the styles.xml in your res folder(if the file already exists then just add the new style at the end) :
That's it, now you just need to apply this to the Activity which you want to be transparent in the AndroidManifest.xml
Congratulations, you now have a transparent activity ready for your spying app! So now whenever you start this activity the user won't see any UI as it is completely invisible. You can now perform any actions in the MainActivity.java and the user wont even know that there is something happening.
That's all great but with great power comes great responsibility, so there are two things which you need to make sure as an efficient Android developer :
1. Our transparent activity is still registering touches, so the user is going to be pissed at you if he can't see your activity but his touches don't get registered on the screen. So we would want to make our app to stop listening for touch events so that the user's touches are registered on the visible UI screen.
This is pretty simple as well, all we need to do is add a single line of code in our MainActivity.java
getWindow().addFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_NOT_TOUCHABLE); // Do not listen for touch events
Basically what that does is, it tells Android to stop registering Touch Events for this activity. Now the user can click the screen as normal without even knowing that your activity is is there spying on him. :P
2. I would not recommend the use of this unless absolutely necessary because since the activity is invisible it will be running and hogging the resources from the device. You can call the finish() method but even after that the app will be in the background consuming resource until the OS kills it. So please make sure you use this only if absolutely necessary and there is no other way of achieving what you want.
That's all from my end, feel free to drop me a comment below if you have any queries !
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