Android Intent

  Intent is used to provide the communication between activity to activity, activity to broadcast receiver or activity to services. Intent is also a mechanism for describing a specific action,such as opening call log etc. In android Everything happens using intents so you have plenty of opportunities to replace or reuse components.

Intent is used for following reasons :-

     1) Launching an Activity

     2) To Start a new Service

     3) For broadcasting messages

     4) To display list of contacts in list view.

with respect to activity to activity communication there are two types of Intent

  1) Implicit Intent

  2) Explicit Intent

1) Implicit Intent :-

        Implicit intent is used to call the built in activities like camera, caller, browser , settings etc.

 2) Explicit Intent :-

        Explicit intent is used to call the user defined Activities.  

         We are not only able to call user defined Activities we can also call the  3rd party application  Activities from our application.like watsapp,

     

Intent example :-