Develop Reference

Pausing/Resuming Activity outside of an activity

I have 2 activities. Main Activity A & Activity B
I do not want Activity A to destroy. I am starting Activity B in a new task.
public static void startActivity(Class<?> startClass) {
Intent intent = new Intent(Constants.getActivity(), startClass);
intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK);
Constants.getActivity().startActivity(intent);
}`
Constants.getActivity() returns the Context on current activity
startClass is the either activity "A" or activity "B"
Thing is they create/destroy the activities and they leak. Am I doing it wrong? How can I start activity "B" from activity "A" and vice versa keep them both in background when I dont need them.

First of all, what are you trying to do? You should always separate things you want to do in the background from your UI. Think of your Activities are simply a container to show the UI, everything else can be stored and restored from persistent storage or savedinstance bundles.
It is very crucial that you understand the difference between Activity lifecycle and Service lifecycle here.
I'm going to refer to my answer from another question here:
Your app will be in the background, onResume and onPause will both be called, provided that the OS have enough memory to keep the new app and all the old apps.
If you have a long running process that you need while the user not looking at it, use a service.
If you need the user to return the app in the same state, you need to do the work in onResume and onPause to save the state information and initialize your UI again when the user comes back. If you are really worried that it can get killed (well, it shouldn't lose the bundle I think), you can store them in SharePreferences for your app.
If you want to know when the app returns from that specific share intent, use startActivityForResult

You cannot keep an activity "alive" as you said. When an activity is paused, Android system is always able to claim its memory and unload it, at any time.
But if you want to switch from A to B, then maybe A and B can be different views inside a single activity. Maybe you'll want to have a look at http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/ViewFlipper.html

When you use tasks, cleanup is very important. You need to cleanup all tasks in the activity. readthis
If the activity does not have a lot of crazy initialization, just use finish and onCreates. Else be aware that onResume will be called often as you switch between activity's. Cleanup will be crucial here. If you dont cleanup, its possible one of your activities (with dead object reference from the other cleaned up activity) may come back up from the activity stack and throw exceptions. Its very difficult to debug this kinda exception.

Activity is stopped when starting new activity with a custom Camera implementation

When starting a new activity that has a custom Camera implementation, the main activity is closed (onStop is called with IsFinishing() set to true). When calling other activities this does not happen. I am working under the assumption that the main activity is being closed due to a low memory condition, as I can start other activities without error. How do I prevent the main activity from being shutdown when I call the camera activity, as there is a service started in the main activity that will be re-used for the camera activity?
Code that calls new activity:
startActivity(new Intent(Context, MyClass.Snapshot.class));

Try using startActivityForResult to signal to Android that you want your Activity to be delivered a result.

I don't think keeping the MainActivity from closing is a viable option. You stated that the reason is related to the MainActivity starting a service. Well really anything with a a reference to a Context can start a service. You could use a Singleton quite easily. I think keeping the Main Activity around is not necessary, and not a good practice since Android can always decide something like this. One thing you might try is to startSticky the Service and see if that makes a difference. Let us know.

The answer is my own stupidity. Had a bunch of commented code below my startActivity call, but I forgot to comment out 1 line towards the bottom... That line was calling onFinish() which would explain everything.
Thank you everyone for trying to diagnose my stupidity.

Not able to kill 2 activities at the same time. why is that?

I'm trying to kill 2 activities on the onclick of a button. The current activity and the previous activity. Using their pids. I'm just able to kill one activity. Why does this happen?
public void onClick(View v) {
android.os.Process.killProcess(pidofmain);
android.os.Process.killProcess(android.os.Process.myPid());
}
If I see in my logcat, The activity with pid "pidofmain" is getting killed whereas the current activity is not getting killed.
"pidofmain" is an integer i received from the previous activity using an intent.

Leave process killing to the OS. This is bad for any kind of program in a timesharing OS. If you want to conserve memory or something like that, let the OS handle it.
Also you can't really know if the process was correctly killed because well, if it is you wouldn't know, and if it doesn't you were not supposed to do it.
What do you want to do this for?

A much better way to do this is to call finish() for the current activity. You can also signal the previous activity to finish if it calls the current activity using startActivityForResult(Intent). The current activity would call setResult(int) before calling finish() to send a return code back to the previous activity. The previous activity can test the return code in onActivityResult(int, int, Intent) and also call finish() based on the result code.
Killing processes should be left to the OS. Once the activities finish, the will kill it off if it needs the resources. Otherwise it can let it around, which might help speed up a relaunch of your app if the user wants to run it again.

This isn't a definitive answer, but more like some thoughts that I have but it's too late for my to fire up Eclipse and prototype them. If it doesn't help you let me know and I'll try to look into it deeper tomorrow night.
A few thoughts (I hope they help):
1) Android apps really are single-threaded, and your main activity controls all the dispatch events (including events to what I assume to be a second thread that you created). If you kill the main activity, I'm pretty sure that your application would terminate execution immediately following your first call to android.os.Process.killProcess(pidofmain), and you'd never make it to your second call because you would have killed your entire application. Again, this is assuming by the variable name pidofmain that you are killing the main UI thread and not just an activity called main.
2) I'm a little curious also about where you got pidofmain? It sounds like you have three activities total, and in the first activity you get it's process id and send it to the second activity in an intent bundle, which also gets passed along to a third activity (which is the place where you're trying to kill this whole thing)? If that is the case, and you're trying to kill the currently running activity, the table in the documentation here leads me to believe that you can't just kill an activity that's in the resumed state using the same method. Official Android Docs for Activity You might want to try calling the finish() method for your currently running activity.
What exactly do you see in logcat? And what happens in the UI? Does the visible activity continue to run, but the other activity has been removed from the backstack?

Android app exit, which Mechanism to use?

following are the ways to exits from the application
1. ActivityObject.finish();
2. Runtime.getRuntime().exit(0);
I want to know which way is to be used & when ?
if there is another way please let me know
Thanks in advance.
Shrenik

That's usually not a good idea at all to "exit" an application in android. That's against Android nature. Read this topic first before doing something like that.

Look at this life cycle of an Android activity:
And the description of the OnDestroy state:
The final call you receive before your
activity is destroyed. This can happen
either because the activity is
finishing (someone called finish() on
it, or because the system is
temporarily destroying this instance
of the activity to save space. You can
distinguish between these two
scenarios with the isFinishing()
method.
So calling ActivityObject.finish() is the right way to do it.

call moveTaskToBack(true) on your Activity

android: unusual way to start activity

In one activity I need to start another one but with one condition: if it was started before then it must be finished and started again. This activity show some information about system state (Theme.Dialog style) it also can start some services and so on. As far as I know when I do startActivity(intent) then onResume() will be called (if activity was started before). Does anybody know how to do it?

That's precisely how it should work. If you need to adjust the values on-screen, put that code in onResume(). What may not be obvious from its name is that onResume() is called when the Activity is first created as well. It's always the last method called before an Activity becomes active.

use the NEW_TASK_LAUNCH flag in the startActivity() call. Read documentation http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/faq/framework.html#4

In the manifest file, in the activity attributes, you have the attribute launch mode, which let you specify how the activity must be launched (http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/activity-element.html#lmode).
Take a look at the description to see which mode suits most your needs. Then when the activity is brought to front, you can restart your service by overriding the Activity.onResume() method.

In one activity I need to start another one but with one condition: if it was started before then it must be finished and started again
There is nothing that only does this. The closest is to have the combination of FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TASK|FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK, but that has other side effects, such as wiping out any other activities.
As far as I know when I do startActivity(intent) then onResume() will be called (if activity was started before).
Not by default. By default, a second instance of the activity is created.