Learning MIT App Inventor: A Hands-On Guide to Building Your Own Android Apps

Using the Maps App with Intents

A great thing about smartphones is that you can pass off jobs to other apps on the phone. You already do this all the time. An email link opens your email app. A web link opens a web browser. A piece of location data opens a mapping app. We’re going to focus on that last one.

To activate another app on an Android phone, the current app must send a special signal to the Android operating system, called an intent. An intent is a request to handle something. The operating system passes off that information to an appropriate app that knows how to handle it. If you’ve ever seen a dialog box pop up asking you to choose which app to use to open something, you’ve seen Android asking you for help in handling an intent. ...