What is an Intent?
December 23, 2009 Andriod, Tutorial
An intent is an asynchronous message used to activate an Andriod Application Components like Activity, Service and broadcast receiver, content providers are not activated by intents but by receiving a request from ContentResolver.
To activate an Activity an intent object with information of action being requested and URI of the data to be acted upon is passed to Context.startActivity() or Activity.startActivityForResult().
A service can be passed by passing an intent object to Context.startService(). To establish an ongoing connection between the calling component and a target service Context.bindService() is called by passing an intent object.
Similarly and intent object is passed to Context.sendBroadcast(), Context.sendOrderedBroadcast(), or Context.sendStickyBroadcast() to activate a service.