Programmatically register a broadcast receiver

One important point that people forget to mention is the life time of the Broadcast Receiver. The difference of programmatically registering it from registering in AndroidManifest.xml is that. In the manifest file, it doesn't depend on application life time. While when programmatically registering it it does depend on the application life time. This means that if you register in AndroidManifest.xml, you can catch the broadcasted intents even when your application is not running.

Edit: The mentioned note is no longer true as of Android 3.1, the Android system excludes all receiver from receiving intents by default if the corresponding application has never been started by the user or if the user explicitly stopped the application via the Android menu (in Manage → Application). https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-3.1.html

This is an additional security feature as the user can be sure that only the applications he started will receive broadcast intents.

So it can be understood as receivers programmatically registered in Application's onCreate() would have same effect with ones declared in AndroidManifest.xml from Android 3.1 above.

In your onCreate method you can register a receiver like this:

private BroadcastReceiver receiver;

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState){

  // your oncreate code should be

  IntentFilter filter = new IntentFilter();
  filter.addAction("SOME_ACTION");
  filter.addAction("SOME_OTHER_ACTION");

  receiver = new BroadcastReceiver() {
    @Override
    public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
      //do something based on the intent's action
    }
  };
     registerReceiver(receiver, filter);
}

Remember to run this in the onDestroy method:

 @Override
 protected void onDestroy() {
  if (receiver != null) {
   unregisterReceiver(receiver);
   receiver = null;
  }
  super.onDestroy();
 }