Skip to main content

Context-registered Broadcast Receivers

Context-registered broadcast receivers (or runtime-registered broadcast receivers) are broadcast receivers that are programmatically registered to a Context. The receiver will receive broadcasts as long as the Context is valid.

Characteristics​

Compared to manifest-registered one, context-registered broadcast receiver has these characteristics:

  1. They are not constrained by implicit broadcast exceptions introduced in Android 8.0 (API level 26) like manifest-registered broadcast receivers.
  2. Android 13 introduces the ability to specify a flag to indicate whether the broadcast receiver is exported or not.
    1. If you are targeting Android 14 (API level 34), this flag becomes required for non-system broadcasts.

Basic Usage​

Let's say we have a simple BroadcastReceiver subclass that listens to a custom intent action:

MyCustomBroadcastReceiver.kt
package com.hanmajid.androidnotebook

import android.content.BroadcastReceiver
import android.content.Context
import android.content.Intent
import android.util.Log

/**
 * Simple broadcast receiver that listens to "com.hanmajid.androidnotebook.MY_CUSTOM_INTENT" intent action.
 */
class MyCustomBroadcastReceiver : BroadcastReceiver() {
    override fun onReceive(context: Context, intent: Intent) {
        val state = intent.getStringExtra("state")
        Log.i("TAG", "State is: $state")
    }
}

To register this broadcast receiver to a Context you can use ContextCompat.registerReceiver() method:

import android.content.Context
import android.content.Intent
import android.content.IntentFilter
import androidx.core.content.ContextCompat

// Initialize broadcast receiver within your context.
val broadcastReceiver = MyCustomBroadcastReceiver()

// Register broadcast receiver to [context]. 
ContextCompat.registerReceiver(
    context,
    broadcastReceiver,
    IntentFilter("com.hanmajid.androidnotebook.MY_CUSTOM_INTENT"),
    ContextCompat.RECEIVER_NOT_EXPORTED, // Required in Android 14+ for non-system broadcasts
)

You can test this broadcast receiver by sending the broadcast:

import android.content.Context
import android.content.Intent

context.sendBroadcast(
    Intent().apply {
        action = "com.hanmajid.androidnotebook.MY_CUSTOM_INTENT"
        `package` = context.packageName
        putExtra("state", "OK")
    }
)

References​

Last updated on