How to tell if USB is connected to android device?

Question

I've written an Android application and I would like the application to be able to recognize when the Android device is plugged into a PC via the USB or even better, know when it is connected and adb logcat is running. Is this possible?

My purpose is to write traces to a separate circular buffer (which would get written to the sdcard occasionally) except when the device is connected e.g., via Eclipse and logcat is running - in that case, I would like to display the traces as part of logcat as they occur.

Answer 1

According to the Intent doc, you have several intents fired related to USB Storage:

ACTION_MEDIA_SHARED
Broadcast Action: External media is unmounted because it is being shared via USB mass storage.

ACTION_UMS_CONNECTED
Broadcast Action: The device has entered USB Mass Storage mode.

ACTION_UMS_DISCONNECTED Broadcast Action: The device has exited USB Mass Storage mode.

You can write a broadcast receiver to know when the device will be connected via USB.

Hope this helped.