Detecting a long press with Android

GestureDetector is the best solution.

Here is an interesting alternative. In onTouchEvent on every ACTION_DOWN schedule a Runnable to run in 1 second. On every ACTION_UP or ACTION_MOVE, cancel scheduled Runnable. If cancelation happens less than 1s from ACTION_DOWN event, Runnable won't run.

final Handler handler = new Handler(); 
Runnable mLongPressed = new Runnable() { 
    public void run() { 
        Log.i("", "Long press!");
    }   
};

@Override
public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event, MapView mapView){
    if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN)
        handler.postDelayed(mLongPressed, ViewConfiguration.getLongPressTimeout());
    if((event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE)||(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_UP))
        handler.removeCallbacks(mLongPressed);
    return super.onTouchEvent(event, mapView);
}

Try this:

final GestureDetector gestureDetector = new GestureDetector(new GestureDetector.SimpleOnGestureListener() {
    public void onLongPress(MotionEvent e) {
        Log.e("", "Longpress detected");
    }
});

public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) {
    return gestureDetector.onTouchEvent(event);
};

I have a code which detects a click, a long click and movement. It is fairly a combination of the answer given above and the changes i made from peeping into every documentation page.

//Declare this flag globally
boolean goneFlag = false;

//Put this into the class
final Handler handler = new Handler(); 
    Runnable mLongPressed = new Runnable() { 
        public void run() { 
            goneFlag = true;
            //Code for long click
        }   
    };

//onTouch code
@Override
    public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
        switch (event.getAction()) {    
        case MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN:
            handler.postDelayed(mLongPressed, 1000);
            //This is where my code for movement is initialized to get original location.
            break;
        case MotionEvent.ACTION_UP:
            handler.removeCallbacks(mLongPressed);
            if(Math.abs(event.getRawX() - initialTouchX) <= 2 && !goneFlag) {
                //Code for single click
                return false;
            }
            break;
        case MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE:
            handler.removeCallbacks(mLongPressed);
            //Code for movement here. This may include using a window manager to update the view
            break;
        }
        return true;
    }

I confirm it's working as I have used it in my own application.