Detecting and launching an external application from a Windows Phone 7.1 / 7.5 application

I need to write an application that can detect if the "Bing - Get me there" application is installed on the current phone, and if so, launch it.

Is it possible? The application will have to do this for other external applications as well, so a generic method or interface will be useful for this.

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Apps run in a sandbox on Windows Phone and there is no way to know if other apps are installed unless you write both of them and use the method to announce to other apps you have installed and they know how to read this announcement.

2 approaches to such ads would be:



  • Ask both (all) applications to sync with the web server and report on which devices they were installed. Apps can ask what other apps have been installed on this device.
  • All applications write the file to a location where all applications are available. The only thing to do is PicturesLibrary, so you need to insert the ID in the name of the image or its content and be able to query all images to identify other installed applications. The user can manually delete any images you create this way, though.

Beware, none of the methods can tell if another application was subsequently uninstalled, although this is far from secure.

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As far as I know, there is no way to do this. Windows Phone apps run in complete isolation and cannot work with other apps other than some specialized apps (such as playing media files).



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