An intent filter is a declaration in the application manifest file that specifies the type of intent that a component would like to receive. This is useful in a number of cases, such as a scenario in which you want an activity in your application to handle a specific action requested by components in another application. For this case, an intent filter can be declared in the application manifest for the activity you want to handle the external request. If you do not want an activity to handle implicit intents, you simply do not declare an intent filter for it.