On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 12:58 PM, Mark Murphy <mmur...@commonsware.com>wrote:

> I suspect that part of the reason why user-level screenshot capability
> is not in the OS is to make damn sure that there's no way via
> reflection or other games that somebody could programmatically invoke
> it. That's just a guess, though.
>

Mostly it is because it is not as easy as people think.  There is no
consistent way across the various hardware to get the current contents of
the screen -- on some hardware you can't even get to the frame buffer to
read back, or reading back the frame buffer may not give you a consistent
snapshot.

In Android 3.0 there is a way to have the surface flinger re-render the
screen to an off-screen bitmap to transfer out through a shared memory area
that is used for the running tasks previews.  This facility will be used at
some point to allow the user to take screenshots (and is the way ddms now
takes screen shots), though no UI has been build for that yet.

-- 
Dianne Hackborn
Android framework engineer
hack...@android.com

Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to
provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails.  All such
questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and
answer them.

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