This article is part of the Floating Windows on Android series. The whole source code for this article is available on Github.Įager to learn more about Android development? Follow me ( and Localazy ( on Twitter, or like Localazy on Facebook. We will address both of these problems in the next articles. The keyboard is not activated and doesn't appear. The window stays in the center of the screen, and we can't move it anywhere.The window is still there visible above them. As normal Android apps rely on the system to provide many of these features, I had to rewrite all of these features for Floating Apps from scratch.Īs you can see in the animation below, we open our new floating window and even switch apps. I will teach you more about all these issues in one of the next articles.Īlso, all running apps are registered with the global list of active windows, and that allows for many exciting features - listing all active apps, running some of them only once, reactivating running apps instead of rerunning them, cross-app state refreshing, etc.Īs you can see, there can be a vast logic. Also, the Application class can automatically solve a lot of shortcomings in floating technology. When the app is launched, the information from its header file is used to create the app's instance and an instance of Window.Įach of the apps extends Application that provides a basic set of features for managing its lifecycle, defining menus, handling window size, position, minimizing, etc. Headers files are kept in memory and used for listing available apps. Each of them has a header file that contains the necessary information about it - localized name, internal identifier, icon, list of required permissions, launch preferences, window presets, etc. If you are interested in how complex the logic behind simple floating windows can get, there is a bit of the background from Floating Apps. Private fun getCurrentDisplayMetrics (): DisplayMetrics Furthermore, WindowManager supports and enhances the virtual desktop functions of Windows 10 and 11 (switching desktops with Hot-Keys, individual desktop icons, etc.) Remembers and restores the position and size of your programs and windows. Fortunately, it allows us to add and remove views directly, and if we add them with correct parameters, we have our floating windows! With WindowManager, you can also minimize most windows to the system tray. WindowManager is an interface that the app can use for communication with the window manager.Īnd the window manager on Android handles everything you can see on the screen. In this article, I will teach you how to show the actual floating window over other apps. I received feedback from tens of thousands of users and see various issues on different phones with different Android versions.īefore reading this article, it's recommended to go through Floating Windows on Android 3: Permissions. It’s sometimes tricky, and I spent months reading documentation and Android source code and experimenting. After 6 years of the development of the app, I know a bit about it. I'm the author of Floating Apps the first app of its kind on Google Play and the most popular one with over 8 million downloads. As part of the required changes, I've had to change both overlays' param types to _APPLICATION_OVERLAY, so I lost the ability to give OV1 a higher priority to make sure it stays on top of OV2.Have you ever wondered how to make those floating windows used by Facebook Heads and other apps? Have you ever wanted to use the same technology in your app? It’s easy, and I will guide you through the whole process. This has always worked fine, until I started updating the app to target Android's API 27 (Oreo). Since OV1 had higher priority, it always stayed on top of OV2, so it wasn't affected by FLAG_DIM_BEHIND, and the user could interact with OV1 just fine to close the OV2 sub-button menu. The solution I found was setting layout params differently for each overlay: One issue I had when initially implementing the above, is that the dimming effect was cast over everything that isn't OV2, including OV1, darkening and making it unclickable, which prevents OV2 from being closed as OV1 is the toggle button. OV2 also dims the rest of the screen while present, by use of the flag _DIM_BEHIND. When this overlay is pressed, it spawns a second overlay, OV2, which contains multiple sub-buttons positioned around OV1's current location. Provides low-level communication with the system window manager for operations that are bound to a particular context, display or parent window. I have an overlay for my app, OV1, which is basically a button the user can move around on their screen. Since WindowManager itself is of interface type, we can directly see its implementation class WindowManagerImpl.
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