Programmatically check if Facebook is installed on Android device

One might be working on an Android application and integrating it with Facebook to share a story, image or a game point scored, to do that the first thing that you would like to know is if Facebook is really installed on the device or not.

⛏️ com.facebook.katana is the package name for the Facebook app on Android.

Let's see how we can do this by creating a single java method,

• Create a method say isFacebookInstalled() that returns a boolean.
• Get the PackageManager instance using getPackageManager()
• Now declare a boolean flag and set it to false by default.
• In a try and catch block look for the package for Facebook: com.facebook.katana
• If it throws an exception then we do not have this package installed, just turn a false in this case.

You can create a method as below and check if the user has Facebook installed or not,

public Boolean checkFbInstalled() {
   PackageManager pm = getPackageManager();
   boolean flag = false;
    try {
     pm.getPackageInfo("com.facebook.katana", PackageManager.GET_ACTIVITIES);
     flag = true;
   } catch (PackageManager.NameNotFoundException e) {
      flag = false;
  }
   return flag;
 }

⛏️ Facebook is known via various package names as well, you can try using one of these,

• com.example.facebook
• com.facebook.katana
• com.facebook.orca
• com.facebook.android

⚠️ If you are integrating Facebook SDK with your application you may really not need to do this as the SDK framework can handle this.

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