Android App activities installed as multiple icons
AndroidAndroid Problem Overview
My Android App has 2 activities. A login screen and a search screen. When I deploy the app on emulator or on my device, I see 2 icons for same app. When I click on icon 1 it opens screen 1 (login screen) and When I click on icon 2 it opens screen 2 (search screen). By logic when I login it should show the search screen. Not sure when I'm making the mistake.
Android Solutions
Solution 1 - Android
Your manifest file should only have this line in the activity you want to have an icon:
<category android:name="android.intent.category.MAIN" />
Based on your description, it sounds like both activities have this line.
Solution 2 - Android
In your mainfest file when you have following tag in two different activities tags at the time, Android app seems to be installed twice.
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
</intent-filter>
Solution 3 - Android
The comment made by @Adrian C on his answer solved our problem.
The manifest file of our main application had only one intent-filter
tag specifying only one activity as the launcher activity for the application.
So I had to look deeper...
We included library projects (luckily written by us) and the manifest file of one of the library projects had an intent-filter
tag on its activity specifying that activity as the launcher activity.
When we then included that library project in our main application (which has its own intent-filter
specifying a launcher activity), the complete source code saw two intent-filter
tags specifying two activities as launcher activities and therefore two application icons were created.
When we removed the intent-filter
specifying a launcher activity in the library project, the second app launcher icon disappeared.