I am trying to figure out what is the correct (new) approach for handling the Intent.ACTION_MEDIA_BUTTON in Froyo. In pre 2.2 days we had to register a BroadcastReceiver (either permanently or at run-time) and the Media Button events would arrive, as long as no other application intercepts them and aborts the broadcast.

Froyo seems to still somewhat support that model (at least for the wired headset), but it also introduces the registerMediaButtonEventReceiver, and unregisterMediaButtonEventReceiver methods that seem to control the "transport focus" between applications.

During my experiments, using registerMediaButtonEventReceiver does cause both the bluetooth and the wired headset button presses to be routed to the application's broadcast receiver (the app gets the "transport focus"), but it looks like any change in the audio routing (for example unplugging the headset) shits the focus back to the default media player.

What is the logic behind the implementation in Android 2.2? What is correct way to handle transport controls? Do we have to detect the change in the audio routing and try to re-gain the focus?

This is an issue that any 3rd party media player on the Android platform has to deal with, so I hope that somebody (probably a Google Engineer) can provide some guidelines that we can all follow. Having a standard approach may make headset button controls a bit more predictable for the end users.

Stefan