Trying to found some information about Android app life cycle. So imagine the situation: I open app and than lock screen, and in a few hours phone kill my app process. What will happen when I will unlock screen ? What I will see at the screen ? Android home screen ? or App will restar automatically for me ? Will stack of activities will restore too ? I'll be glad for any help. Thanks...
There is a Life-cycle for the android application BUT the applications have limited control over their own life-cycle, instead the components must listen for changes in the application state and react accordingly, the changes are as the following
onCreate
onLowMemory
onTrimMemory
onConfigurationChanged
and these method are accessed by extending the application class and override them to react accordingly.
regards,
Activity lifecycle is what your looking for.
There is no such thing as Application lifecycle or lifecircle. Every Activity has it's own lifecycle. If the system needs more ram it will be killed if in onPause() or onStop() state. If all your Activities are killed, the app is no longer visible. If you want data to persist you have to Override onPause() and onResume() and save/restore your data there.
Your Application will never restore on its own, if there is an activity killed. You have to keep track of your activities manually if you want to "resume" after kill of your activities.
To make it even more precise: One Activity can be killed and the others can remain paused. If you then return to your app you get the last activity in your activity stack which wasn't killed.
If your app was killed by the system then I don't think it will show up when you unlock the screen. If below your app the main screen was there then I assume it will show up since your app has been killed by the system.
In some cases you can subclass application class:
Base class for those who need to maintain global application state.
You can provide your own implementation by specifying its name in your
AndroidManifest.xml's tag, which will cause that class
to be instantiated for you when the process for your
application/package is created.
and then use app callback methods.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Application.html
Related
I know that, unlike onCreate(), Application class does not have a onDestroy() method. But I wanted to know when my application is closed (or it is not visible on screen anymore). After all, whatsapp and many more similar chat applications can detect when user has left the app, and can record user's last online time. I want to achieve a similar thing. Also, when the application is destroyed, I want to detach all listeners attached to firebase databse.
I have already seen this question, but the accepted answer there is unreliable. So, what is the workaround for onDestroy() for me.
if you are talking about Application class (detecting when it is destroyed) - this is impossible, when Application gets killed developer shouldn't (and don't) have option for executing own code (as it may e.g. restart app from scratch)
but you are talking about app visibility, probably any Activity present on screen - extend Application class (and register it in manifest) and use ActivityLifecycleCallbacks with additional counting code: counter++ when any onActivityStarted and counter-- when onActivityStopped. also in onActivityStopped check if your counter==0, if yes then all your Activities are in background, so app isn't visible on screen (still it doesn't mean that its destroyed/killed)
edit: check out THIS example. or inspect supporting class ProcessLifecycleOwner (which probably is counting visible Activities for you and only calls onAppBackgrounded when all are gone)
You do not need onDestroy callback for it . You should be Doing it in onStop() of ProcessLifecycleOwner . Upon Application destroy your process will be destroys anyways in idle situation so no need to remove listeners there .
Remove the listeners in onStop and attach again in onStart . You can configure Application class with ProcessLifecycleOwner in a way so that Every Activity gets These callbacks. This is how it should works i guess if app is in background u will pop a notification of new message . Checkout ProcessLifecycleOwner.
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()
I am seeking short characteristic of Android Multitasking. I have found, that when you minimize Android application, it is ended and it's process remains on the background. When user wants to reuse his app, this process alive it's application. User will be at the same state, when he left (if there was enough memory while working with it), or it will be loaded from scratch, because there was no free RAM for other work and Android exited this process. Am I right? Everywhere there are articles with 20 pages and more about Android multitaksing. I need to know key points because I am lost in a such long artices.
Thanks
Short Answer: Yes. If your app can live in memory despite being 'closed' then it will stay in RAM and processing will continue when you click on it again. Otherwise it will be restarted and you will get an onResume().
Long Answer: Please just read the Activity Lifecycle:
When Android activity is covered by other windows it will enter into paused state and method onPause will be called. It may also me destroyed by OS and then onDestroy will be called. You have very little control over it and can't expect your application to come back up with the same state. However, when activity is brought up again to foreground in will go through steps of onCreate and onPause. Those methods can be used to restore its state.
Here you can find nice diagrams describing Activity lifecycle. Similar but slightly different lifecycle is applicable to service.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html
Android activities are the main visible screens that user see while the application is running. If you close the screen or switch to another application, the current activity is put to hibernate and you can save the state with
Activity.onSaveInstanceState(Bundle bundle)
After your activity gets the control back, you can restore the state with
Activity.onRestoreInstanceState(Bundle bundle)
Note that you need to be careful not to store any context references within the activities and related classes as the activity and thus context has changed between pause and resume. Instead, you should always pass the current activity as the active context to avoid having exceptions from invalid context.
This doesn't appear to be well documented or I missed it, so before I run a bunch of my own tests I was wondering if anyone already knows the answers to some of these questions.
First off, when I say "Application" I am referring to extending the Application class. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Application.html
The questions I have are as follows, some are related.
When an a user leaves an Activity from within the Application, and goes to the Activity of another application, does the Application somehow get paused as well, even though it doesn't have an onPause()? Or does it continue to live unpaused until all of it's activities are destroyed?
when does the Application stop? When all of it's Activities are destroyed?
Is there ever a chance that one of the Applications Activities could be running without an instance of the Application, or will the Application class always exist if one of the Activities does?
If there is some process running on the Application, and it's Activities are all paused, will that process continue to run?
Is the Application effected by rotation in any way or does rotation only change Activities?
Thanks
As you say the application does not have onPause so nothing happens to the application. When onPause gets called in your Activity nothing special happens, your Activity continues to run and can do whatever it wants including run new threads, timers can go off, whatever.
I believe what you are asking is: when is an Application destroyed and when the onTerminate method in an Application called? The answer is hard to pinpoint and is up to the system, it does not necessarily happen when all activities get onDestroyed called. In fact even when onDestroy is called, your Activities aren't necessarily garbage collected. When the system gets low on memory the process that your Application lives in can be killed, meaning your Application will disappear; onTerminate may or may not be called. At that time all the Activities, Services, etc, are killed too.
The Application is always instantiated first, an Activity must have an associated Application, just like how you define it in the AndroidManifest.xml.
Processes never pause in Android, the onPause method does not actually really do anything other than tell you to pause things in your app. Other than that the process keeps chugging away, your threads keep running, even the main thread receive Intents with a BroadcastReceiver.
The Application gets rotation callbacks in the Application's onConfigurationChanged(). I'm not sure if you can disable that since there is no configChanges attributes supported by application tags in the AndroidManifest.xml.
A good comparison to Application is static field in any of your classes. The static fields will live as long the process is not destroyed, just like the Application. Static fields can be accessed by all Activities, Services, etc (assume the static fields are public), just like your Application.
Good Luck!
Jacob
The easiest way to understand this is to just forget that Application exists. Application has nothing to do with the application lifecycle. It is just a global on a process, that can be useful for some things, but is not needed for anything. Everything about how an application runs revolves around the Activity, BroadcastReceiver, Service, and ContentProvider components declared in its .apk.
An instance of Application can continue to exist after your last Activity is destroyed. Even if ALL activities are gone (ie. have all had their onDestroy methods called), the Application instance could still exist.
This application instance could be "re-used" for what you might otherwise think are two separate runs of your application.
This is all explained in detail here: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html. If you read through it, you should understand everything.
Real quick:
Every activity has an onPause. You can choose not to override it, but it'll get called nonetheless. As soon as you switch away, onPause will be called.
Define "stop". Define "Application". The process may linger around forever, but it'll simply sleep and wait until one of its activities is started.
It's impossible for an activity to exist without being instantiated.
Every code executed runs in a process, so there's always one process for your app. The process will continue to exist after you switch to a different app, but it'll be in sleeping state. Android could at any time kill the process if system resources run low.
Every time you rotate the screen, your activity will be destroyed and recreated, unless you specifically disable that.