title: Launching external application from my app
body: <p>I would like to launch an app the user selects from within my application. However, I'm not sure how I'd go about doing this. I've tried this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Intent intent = new Intent();
  intent.setAction(Contacts.Intents.SHOW_OR_CREATE_CONTACT);
  startActivity(intent);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But this seems to throw an error and force close my application. I also tried adding:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;action android:name="Contacts.Intents.SHOW_OR_CREATE_CONTACT"/&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in the AndroidManifest file, but to no avail.</p>
  
  <p>A look at Logcat shows that it's an "IOexception - no such file or directory". A couple of questions arise from this. I read through the Android docs and noticed that the Contact.Intents class is deprecated. However, it's successor, ContactContracts is aimed at API level 5 whereas I'm targeting API level 3. Could this be the problem? Also, I've hardcoded this application into the code. Is there a way to retrieve the intents of any application the user selects so that they can be launched?</p>