Android 7.1 introduced a new feature called App Shortcuts. When you long press your app icon, it shows shortcuts to specific actions which can be launched, on supported launchers. For example, a dialer app can show shortcuts to your recently dialed numbers. A messaging app can show shortcuts to your recent conversations.

In this tutorial, we will create two Activities and add these activities as shortcuts.

Make sure you have updated your Android SDK to 7.1 and Created a virtual device with Android 7.1 System Image.

Here I have created an Android Studio project with package com.learn2crack.appshortcuts also Activity as MainActivity and layout as activity_main.

Our main layout has a Button to launch Profile Activity.

To the left of Android Studio, you will find Project Explorer. Right Click on the app from the project explorer and select,

New -> Activity -> Empty Activity

Here I have created new Activity as Profile Activity and layout as activity_profile.

It has Text View which displays ProfileActivity.

The shortcuts which to be displayed in the launcher should be defined in an XML file. Let’s create a new shortcuts.xml in res -> xml

It has root <shortcuts> element with child <shortcut> element for each shortcut.

Each shortcut should define shortcutId, label, icon and Intent which it wishes to launch.

<shortcuts xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <shortcut
        android:shortcutId="home"
        android:enabled="true"
        android:icon="@drawable/ic_home_shortcut"
        android:shortcutShortLabel="@string/activity_home_name">
        <intent
            android:action="android.intent.action.VIEW"
            android:targetPackage="com.learn2crack.appshortcuts"
            android:targetClass="com.learn2crack.appshortcuts.MainActivity" />
    </shortcut>
    <shortcut
        android:shortcutId="profile"
        android:enabled="true"
        android:icon="@drawable/ic_person_shortcut"
        android:shortcutShortLabel="@string/activity_profile_name">
        <intent
            android:action="android.intent.action.VIEW"
            android:targetPackage="com.learn2crack.appshortcuts"
            android:targetClass="com.learn2crack.appshortcuts.ProfileActivity" />
    </shortcut>
</shortcuts>

Finally this shortcuts.xml should be referenced in manifest’s meta-data.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    package="com.learn2crack.appshortcuts">

    <application
        android:allowBackup="true"
        android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher"
        android:label="@string/app_name"
        android:supportsRtl="true"
        android:theme="@style/AppTheme">
        <activity
            android:name=".MainActivity">
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />

                <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
            </intent-filter>
            <meta-data
                android:name="android.app.shortcuts"
                android:resource="@xml/shortcuts" />
        </activity>
        <activity
            android:name=".ProfileActivity"
            android:label="Profile"/>
    </application>
</manifest>

You can download the complete project as zip or fork from our Github repository.

Stay tuned!

Enjoy coding 🙂