android - Go to settings screen

Question

I want to open the Settings-> Sound & Display-> Phone Ringtones screen from my application. How can I do that?

Answer 1

Depending on your needs, there are a couple of alternatives to bring up the 'Ringtones' settings screen from your application.

If you want to bring up the actual preferences screen that is usually available through system settings -- letting your user modify the phone's universal ringtone settings through your application -- you can use the ACTION_SOUND_SETTINGS constant from the android.provider.Settings class to create a new Intent to start the sound settings activity.

startActivityForResult(new Intent(android.provider.Settings.ACTION_SOUND_SETTINGS), 0);

If you want to select a custom ringtone to use in your application you need to add a RingtonePreference in your preferences.xml definition file, like this:

<RingtonePreference
  android:key="alerts_ringtone"
  android:title="Select ringtone" 
  android:showDefault="true"
  android:showSilent="true"
  android:ringtoneType=""
/> 

You'll be able to get the URI to the selected preference in the application's default SharedPreferences using alerts_ringtone as the key.

The latter technique uses the PreferenceActivity class to host the preference options. I won't describe that in detail here, as the Android documentation has a good writeup and some sample code.