could you suggest me how can I make my app does not go on pause?
Thanks
Unfortunately, you essentially have no control over the state of your main activity. onPause() will get called anytime you application loses the foreground. You can look here to get a general idea of how life cycles work. You can use a service to keep executing tasks even while your application is in the background. It would also be a good idea to save state anytime onPause() is called. That way the user can resume your application smoothly, even if it is eventually killed by the os.
Related
If I, for example, need to keep some very important data which the user can edit within my app, should I need to save them every time user changes such data or is it ok if I would save it within onPause(), onStop() or onDestroy() methods?
Can somehow application end without any of those methods calling? (For instance when battery runs out)
This certainly can't be done in onDestroy().
According to the documentation:
There are situations where the system will simply kill the activity's
hosting process without calling this method (or any others) in it, so
it should not be used to do things that are intended to remain around
after the process goes away.
So yes, the application can end without calling any of the lifecycle methods.
In that scenario when the phone is shutting down, you can use the ACTION_SHUTDOWN Intent.
More info here. For all other cases onPause should do the work. Even in the link provided, there is a statement that onPause will be called if the app is in FG.
Apps will not normally need to handle this, since the foreground
activity will be paused as well.
However, if it is not so expensive operation, I would go with saving data after edit.
As per the documentation of Android activity life cycle, onPause is called when an activity is going into the background, but has not (yet) been killed.
Hence, in most Android documentation, and sample codes you will find onPause is used for saving any persistent state the activity is editing, to present a "edit in place" model to the user and making sure nothing is lost if there are not enough resources.
So in your use case, all you need to do is implement onPause for your Activity and write a code to Save the activity state (EditText content or any other ongoing user interactions). Android system will save the activity state which you can always get back in onCreate of your Activity when android launch your activity next time.
in this case please verify your phone activity via debug interface , some of phones are terminate your application this is force quit.
I can't figure out the onDestroy() behaviour.
My question is: Is there any chance that an activity will be killed without calling it's onDestroy() while not killing the hole app?
I mean, Could it be that I'll get back to my app (to an activity other then the activity that the launcher calls) and be in a situation where one activity was killed without calling it's onDestroy()?
I have a need to know that if I get back from the background to an activity that there is no way some of my activities where killed without it's onDestroy.
Thanks!
No i don't think so , when your application get killed because of lack of Memory your whole app process would be killed so in this situation onDestroy() may not be called and your app will back again on your launcher Activity unless you can save your application state on onPause() state before your app get killed.
yes, Android will kill a least frequently used activity if there is not enough memory is available for the newly started app. Also the back button triggers the onDestroy(). A best bet is to save your app state. Here is an example to a similar question how to save and restore your current instance.
As stated in the API documentation Activity#onDestroy():
Note: do not count on this method being called as a place for saving
data!
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#onDestroy%28%29
And don't forget to call super.onDestroy()
More concretely: Is it safe to place the canceling of a task in onDestroy? Also, is it safe to use onDestroy for unregistering receivers and freeing up resources?
My aim is to make sure that my task is canceled/destroyed when the Activity is destroyed, but not before.
onDestroy():
is called when the activity is destroyed and resources must be
released.
is NOT called when the activity is destroyed in a hurry (when the
system is low on resources etc).
The first case is clear: I do all cleaning in onDestroy and no problems arise. The second case is a bit of a problem though. When the Activity is destroyed and onDestroy is skipped (so I don't cancel my task), could it happen that the task continues execution, then completes and tries to update the dead Activity, so the app crashes?
We come to the real question:
When an Activity is killed and onDestroy is skipped, is everything attached to that Activity automatically destroyed? (Is onDestroy skipped only in case that everything will be wiped out altogether? Tasks, registered receivers etc)
If onDestroy is skipped does this mean that the whole app is being killed?
Let's focus on onDestroy(), because the solution is not in onPause() or onStop(). Arguments:
onStop() could be skipped when the Activity is being destroyed, just like onDestroy
onPause is called too early and too often, so it is not appropriate for the use case. Examples:
Screen lock: onPause can be called when the device screen is locked. Very often this happens like a screensaver and the user unlocks immediately because he is standing there looking at the screen. Canceling tasks and stopping everything my app is doing in such a case will only degrade user experience. I don't want my app to choke and misbehave just because of an incidental "screensaver".
In an example app I have two screens that are Activities. The user can quickly switch between them. In this app users tend to switch screens often and quickly.
Navigation: One of the screens has a map which receives location updates from the system. It records a precise graphical log of the changes in location (route), so it needs to run constantly until the Activity is closed. Normally I would register and unregister any receivers in onResume and onPause. However, this would make the app very unusable, as the updates on the map will stop every time the user navigates away. Therefore, I would like to unregister the receivers in onDestroy.
Loading list: The second screen has a list that shows data from a webservice. It takes 4 seconds to download the data. I use an AsyncTask and I know I should cancel when necessary. It should not be canceled in onPause, because it should continue loading while the user switches between screens. Therefore, I would like to cancel it in onDestroy.
There can be many more examples. Some of them might not be totally appropriate in everyone's opinion (you might even suggest using a service instead of AsyncTask). But the idea is important, and all of them have the same idea: keep on doing work that's specific to the Activity, while the Activity is paused, but ENSURE to stop doing it when the Activity is destroyed. (It does not matter whether I am using an AsyncTask or a Service. In either case, the work should be stopped when the Activity is destroyed.)
P.S. If the answer is that it is not safe to do the clean up in onDestroy, this would mean that the Android framework requires us to stop everything we are doing in onPause. And then I would not see any reason for using onDestroy...
I would like to refer you to this baby: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/ComponentCallbacks2.html#onTrimMemory(int)
Essentially it gives you all the places where the system finds it useful to cancel tasks and clean its memory:
Please take a closer looks at the following 2 cases:
TRIM_MEMORY_UI_HIDDEN - the process had been showing a user interface, and is no longer doing so.
TRIM_MEMORY_COMPLETE - the process is nearing the end of the background LRU list.
Which are the cases for most of what you asked.
In the same method you can also catch TRIM_MEMORY_RUNNING_CRITICAL which will alert you to a case where the system has no memory and special actions must be taken immediately.
This method has made my development life much better in similar cases.
If you just need to do some cleanup, no matter how the activity is closed, you should be able to use a combination of onSaveInstanceState() and onDestroy(). One of those should be called no matter what. Maybe have a boolean cleanupDone in your activity, which is set whenever one of the two finishes.
Concerning saving of user data, have a look at Saving Persistent State:
Google suggest a
"edit in place" user model
That is: save as soon as the user creates new data, at the latest in onPause(). This does not mean that you need to recreate the data in onResume(), just that it should have been saved.
By the way: onStop() can be skipped only on pre-Honeycomb devices, that is, as of June 2015, less than 6 % of all devices. Still, onSaveInstanceState() should be called if either onDestroy() or onStop() are omitted.
As far as I gone with android,
1 When your apps crashes every resource relevant to it are destroyed.
2 When the device changes configuration resulting the Activity to be destroyed and recreated.
3 When apps running in background and Android kill it due to running on Low Memory
apart from these the other callback method are called i e
1 when another Activity come in front , or your device locks ..etc
In all case according to your requirement you can release all your resources in onDestroy and cancel the Thread and Asyntask and stop all the services etc .if you want your task remain paused and alive while on destroy called then you can save the configuration and retain it while onCreate is called again by check is null or not.
I know I can use isFinishing() in onPause() to know whether an activity is going to be killed by finish().
Then, how can I know an activity is going to be killed by OS temporarily due to low memory?
Thanks.
Per the docs, onDestroy should be called right before the Activity is destroyed, regardless of the reason. If the finish was requested, isFinishing will return true. So if it is false, you can assume that the system needed to finish.
However, as the docs also say
Note: do not count on this method
being called as a place for saving
data!
In general, you cannot guarantee that your Activity will be killed nicely. Things like task killers mess with the lifecycle.
Use onPause or onSaveInstanceState to save things properly.
You cannot.
It's possible your activity could go away without the rest of your app going way, in this case onDestroy would be called. However it's also possible that your whole app is going to get killed at once, this like a kill -9 in unix. Your app cannot run any code at this time, it's killed instantly and without warning.
To handle this properly, you want to design your app to save all vital information to disk in onPause and be ready to retrieve it later in onCreate if needed.
I know my question caption must have sounded really vague. But let me clear it out here.
Say I have an android application over a middleware stack. In onCreate() of my activity, I initialise my middleware modules.
In its onDestroy(), I must de-initialise the middleware. Now my middleware calls may take quite some time to process. So I want to know how much time the onDestroy() function has, and see whether my deinitialisation can take place within that time.
Is it reasonable to keep my de-init in the onDestroy()?
Also, suppose I initialise the middleware in onCreate() of activity A1. On a button click, activity A1 switches to activity A2. In low memory situations, the LMK will kill the activity that has not been in use for some time. In such a case, won't activity A1 be killed? When activity A1 is killed, will all instances I create in A1 also get destoryed?
Regards,
kiki
I believe you are rather confused to ask this question.
In order to get a good comprehension of what is happening, you should take a look at the lifecycle graphs that can be found on developer.android.com:
Activity lifecycle
Background service lifecycle
You will see that Activity.onDestroy() only gets called in the case of a controlled shutdown of the activity - something that happens extremely rarely, as the Android OS can kill your process in a variety of states without ever calling your onDestroy() method.
What and why do you need to de-initialize?
If you're worried about releasing resources, then most of them will get released anyway when/if your process is killed.
If you are worried about saving the user's data (your application's state) then you should override onSaveInstanceState() and onRestoreInstanceState()
If you really want an answer to your question, then here it is:
While it is running onDestroy(), your app has (probably) as much time as it would like to - the fact that it is even running onDestroy() means that the OS did not select it to be killed. But it will most likely not matter: for one, onDestroy will never be run in most apps, and if the OS changes its mind and decides that your app must die, it will kill it even if it is running onDestroy.
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/design/responsiveness.html:
In Android, the system guards against
applications that are insufficiently
responsive for a period of time by
displaying a dialog to the user,
called the Application Not Responding
(ANR) dialog
The ANR dialog will normally pop up if your application is un-responsive for 5 seconds. As pointed out by jhominal, the onDestroy() method is probably not where you want to do your clean-up/save preferences/etc.
Regardless of where you choose to do this, be it onDestroy(), onSaveInstanceState() or in onPause(), I believe the general 5 second rule will apply. If what you're doing takes more than 5 seconds, the ANR dialog will show and the user can choose to force-close your app.
Edit:
If your application is in the background, it might be (probably?) that it is killed directly without the ANR dialog being displayed if you violate the 5 second rule. But I do not know this for sure, only assuming.