Where are the inline remote settings in Android?

Question

I recently purchased a set of headphones with iPhone controls. I've never had these work on Android before and was expecting to just get audio out, and lo and behold, I have media controls.

The trouble seems to be, I also have Voice Dialing, which is triggering itself anytime the headphones are plugged in. Any app playing music now also pauses and plays randomly.

I don't know exactly what's going on, but I suspect that there are 2-3 different apps all trying to do something with the headset, and it's causing problems. I don't really need it to work, but I can't find any settings dealing with the inline remote anywhere. I've been digging through the system settings and all of my app settings all day and nothing even mentions these behaviors.

I don't care if I have to recompile the kernel myself; I very much want to edit this behavior. Where do I start looking? Is the headset a hardware button? Is there a flag I can check for with an app's code that can detect when a headset with a remote is plugged in to make it do different things?

Answer 1

To my experience, headset control behaved randomly. Took me a couple of weeks to figure out why suddenly in my training sessions the music player started (wow! that button on the headset suddenly does something...). Like you, I never found any corresponding system settings.

To get rid of that "random system", I took a look around. As usual with Android, almost everything is triggering (or triggered by) an intent, and a listener reacts on that. If there are multiple listeners, the user will be asked with which app to perform the action -- and can declare that app the standard; which holds until a new app registers or the chosen app gets uninstalled.

That said, I went to the Playstore and took a look around -- and indeed, there are multiple apps around taking care of the button-presses: Single press, double, triple, long-hold, klick-and-hold... I never imagined how much to do with a single button :D Unfortunately for me, I could not yet convince the one app I tried to behave as intended -- except for single click and single hold (i.e. play/stop/take-call and volume-up) -- but that may be due to the combination of headset/phone/app, and I certainly will try to figure this out by evaluating different apps.

To give you a starting point: there's e.g. JAYS Headset Control, which I currently use. Though highly configurable¹, see above for my problems (Philips plugs, Motorola device). Then there's also Headset Droid which looks quite promising², but costs about EUR 2. This seems to support multiple buttons even, from the screenshots.

Then there are Headset Button Controller (also about EUR 2), Philips Headset (free -- the next one I should try with my Philips headset), and a lot more -- just search the playstore for "headsetbutton"...

Answer 2

You can try Headset button controller. This worked for me.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kober.headsetbutton&hl=en

There is a trial version for this too.