Android intent

An intent is to perform an action on the screen . It is mostly used to start activity, send broadcast receiver,start services and send message between two activities. There are two intents available in android as Implicit Intents and Explicit Intents.

There are two types of intents in android:

Intents could be used to start a Service that performs one-time task(for example: Downloading some file ) or for starting a Service you need to pass Intent to startService() method. Intent for Broadcast Receivers: There are various message that an app receives, these messages are called as Broadcast Receivers.

Intents are used to signal to the Android system that a certain event has occurred. Intents often describe the action which should be performed and provide data upon which such an action should be done. For example, your application can start a browser component for a certain URL via an intent .