android - BroadcastReceivers in ICS

Question

I had written a small utility app just for my phone, which stopped the annoying carrier provided jingle which played on boot up. I noticed the sound didn't play if I put the phone into silent mode before powering off, so I wrote this little utility to go silent on power down and restore sound on boot. This worked well for a Galaxy S2 on Gingerbread. The entire code is in two classes:

public class OnShutDownReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver {

    @Override
    public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
        AudioManager mgr=(AudioManager)context.getSystemService(Context.AUDIO_SERVICE);
        mgr.setRingerMode(AudioManager.RINGER_MODE_SILENT);
    }

}

and

public class OnBootReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver {

  @Override
  public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
      AudioManager mgr=(AudioManager)context.getSystemService(Context.AUDIO_SERVICE);
      mgr.setRingerMode(AudioManager.RINGER_MODE_NORMAL);
  }
}

The manifest is

<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    package="com.nbt.hush"
    android:versionCode="1"
    android:versionName="1.0" >
    <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="7" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED" />
    <application
        android:icon="@drawable/ic_launcher"
        android:label="@string/app_name" >
        <receiver android:name=".OnBootReceiver" >
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.BOOT_COMPLETED" />
            </intent-filter>
        </receiver>
         <receiver android:name=".OnShutDownReceiver" >
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.ACTION_SHUTDOWN" />
            </intent-filter>
        </receiver>
    </application>
</manifest>

Now my phone has been upgraded to ICS by my carrier, it no longer works. If I put the phone into silent mode before powering down, the jingle doesn't play. Therefore I suspect that neither receiver is triggered. (I did put some log code in the receivers which didn't show up, but I suspect that because of the timings it might not have been displayed under Gingerbread either.)

Any suggestions please as to why it won't work anymore?

Answer 1

If you wound up completely uninstalling and reinstalling the app, the problem is that you have no activity.

Starting with Android 3.1, applications are installed in a "stopped" state, where no broadcast receivers will work until the user manually launches an activity. This is an anti-malware move. I blogged about this ~9 months ago.