android_translation_layer/doc/DBusIntentApi.md

DBus Intent API

Cross-application Android Intent delivery is implemented via the Freedesktop D-Bus Activation interface. Android-style Intent objects are serialized and transmitted over DBus using the ActivateAction method of org.freedesktop.Application. The existing Freedesktop interface was reused to ensure compatibility with other Freedesktop interfaces such as org.freedesktop.portal.Notification, which delegates app.-prefixed action activations to this method.

The sender invokes ActivateAction on the DBus name of the target application. This name typically mirrors the Android package name, but may differ, especially under sandboxing constraints (e.g., Flatpak). In Flatpak, exported DBus names must begin with the application ID, which must contain at least two dot-separated components (e.g., org.example.App).

The action_name argument must be one of: startActivity, startService, or sendBroadcast. The parameter argument must be a tuple of DBus type (sssa{sv}s) representing:

(action: s,
 className: s,
 data: s,
 extras: a{sv},
 sender_dbus_name: s)

• action, className, data: correspond to Android Intent fields.
• extras: variant dictionary containing supported primitive types: string, int32, int64, bytestring.
• If extras includes Parcelable values, these must be serialized as DBus tuples. The structure and interpretation of these tuples is implementation-defined and must be shared between sender and receiver out-of-band.

Example cmdline invocation

gdbus call --session --dest org.schabi.newpipe --object-path /org/schabi/newpipe --method org.freedesktop.Application.ActivateAction "startActivity" "[<('android.intent.action.VIEW','org.schabi.newpipe.RouterActivity','https://youtube.com',{'extra_key': <'extra_value'>}, 'my.dbus.Name')>]" []