[djbclark]

Thought this might be useful to people; I couldn't find a HOWTO on this that was BlackBerry 10 specific, and it took a while to figure out. This isn't a step by step guide; if anyone has problems, I can probably help / make this more comprehensive. This post mentions a specific case, but it can, in general, be used to get rid of any prompt for which android app to use as a result of an action in another app.

I love the android "Flipboard" app, but for many articles to read the entire article it opens a web browser. I'm also really dependent on the "Lastpass" android app, which has a built-in web browser. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, there is no way to tell the BlackBerry android runtime to always use the BlackBerry browser; so every time you touch a link in Flipboard, you get a prompt where you choose between the BlackBerry browser and Lastpass.

For my reading style and vociferousness, this means making this choice hundreds of times per week. Super-annoying.

So I looked into how an android app signals to other apps that it is a provider of a kind of service - e.g. that it is able to function as a web browser / can open http:// URLs. Android calls the system that does this "intents", and luckily intents are specified in an app's "AndroidManifest.xml" file in plain text, not in its compiled source code.

So in principle all you need to do is edit that file to remove lines in <indent-filter> sections that link http or https URLs to the app.

However unlike (I think I've read) Blackberry 10 .bar files where you can easily edit the manifest file, to do this with android apps you need to decompile the app, edit the file, recompile the app, sign the app, and zipalign the app. There is a great guide on how to do this up at:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!to...st/Tb8oWqqKGVk

Stupid things that caused me to waste some time were:

1. Even though it is deprecated, you want to use the android eclipse IDE to download stuff, not the new non-eclipse IDE. I'm sure the later would work, but the above doc assumes eclipse, and I didn't want to figure out the equivalent actions with the new IDE.
2. Make sure the "aapt" binary et al are in your PATH - e.g. "which aapt" returns its location. Location of the android build tools (after you download them with the eclipse IDE / eclipe ADT (Android Developent Tools) ecipse plug-ins) should be something like /home/USERNAME/android-sdks/build-tools/21.1.2
3. You run apktool as "java -jar apktool*.jar [apktool options]
4. You can't use zipalign to modify a file in-place - you need to specify an output file.

All this (after figuring it out) took maybe half an hour, most of it background time (e.g. waiting for stuff to download).

*So* worth it :-)

I'm attaching a copy of the post from the above URL below. The formatting leaves much to be desired; use the link, just including here in case that link ever dies.

[Elite1]

Fixed thread title typos for you.

[JTon]

This is valuable info, thanks very sharing

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