how do you get the phone's MCC and MNC in Android?

The only way I've found of retrieving MCC and MNC is by overriding an activity's onConfigurationChanged method, as such:

public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration config)
{
	super.onConfigurationChanged(config);
	DeviceData.MCC = "" + config.mcc;
	DeviceData.MNC = ""  +config.mnc;
}

However, I need this data as soon as the app starts and can't wait for the user to switch the phone's orientation or equivalent to trigger this method. Is there a better way to access the current Configuration object?

The [TelephonyManager][1] has a method to return the MCC+MNC as a String ([getNetworkOperator()][2]) which will do you what you want. You can get access it via:

protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

    TelephonyManager tel = (TelephonyManager) getSystemService(Context.TELEPHONY_SERVICE);
    String networkOperator = tel.getNetworkOperator();

    if (!TextUtils.isEmpty(networkOperator)) {
        int mcc = Integer.parseInt(networkOperator.substring(0, 3));
        int mnc = Integer.parseInt(networkOperator.substring(3));
    }
}

[1]: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/TelephonyManager.html "android.telephony.TelephonyManager" [2]: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/TelephonyManager.html#getNetworkOperator() "getNetworkOperator()"

You do know there are two MCC/MNC's for an active phone? (One is the country code and carrier id for the Sim card, the other is for the network/cell tower in use.)

If the getResources().getConfiguration().mcc is not empty in airplane mode, it's the Sim value TelephonyManager.getSimOperator(), not the tower value TelephonyManager.getNetworkOperator().

I don't know which the OP wants, but Answer 3 will give him different results than his original code if the getConfiguration is really the Sim values.

getResources().getConfiguration().mcc is a bad choice because it returns an integer, hence compromising valid values such as 01, or 044. Clearly integer is not a good option for this.

See details in Mobile_Network_Code

Update: in Australia, we verified a wrong case here. The getNetworkOperator returns different value from getSimOperator, where the latter is correct.

See details in Android doc: TelephonyManager

You can access the current configuration by getResources().getConfiguration() does the trick.

Okay, it turns out that the getResources().getConfiguration().mcc trick is likely better for most purposes, because with the other one if the person puts their phone in airplane mode or otherwise uses Wi-Fi, then it returns an empty MCC.

I found out that network operator sometimes can be like 65@5 when not connected to the operator (service unavailable) even if there is a a SIM card inserted. This happened on Samsung S2 running Android 4.1.2.

So you have to be careful when converting to Int.

 int mcc = Integer.parseInt(networkOperator.substring(0, 3));

this is updated. use this

 TelephonyManager tel = (TelephonyManager) getSystemService(Context.TELEPHONY_SERVICE);
    String networkOperator = tel.getSimOperator();
    System.out.println("************mnc,mcc"+networkOperator);
    if (!TextUtils.isEmpty(networkOperator)) {
         mcc = networkOperator.substring(0, 3);
       mnc = networkOperator.substring(3);System.out.println("************mnc,mcc"+mnc+mcc);
    }mnc_mcc.setText("************mnc,mcc"+mnc+","+mcc);
}