Android Instrumentation - How to detect external activity call

Question

I am using Robotium for testing android applications and am interested in how to detect a situation when an external application activity (e.g. browser, camera, facebook) is being launched by tested app. There are several questions asking how to handle such situation, but all I need is to detect it, for example just log time when it's occurred. Is this possible using Robotium or simple Instrumentation?

BTW, I can't use the solution when system apps are being replaced by fake analogues, I can't even know what application (and when) will be launched, because the tests are random. (Yes, I know, it's a bad approach, but this is a project restriction).

Answer 1

See my answer here. The main idea is to detect current top Activity, which is Activity of external application. You can create Service, which will monitor top activities.

Answer 2

Anther way is to check when your activity looses focus. When it looses focus that means that the other external Activity has focus instead.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#hasWindowFocus()

You can use Solo.waitForCondition() in conjunction with hasWindowFocus.