Android in Practice

Chapter 3. Managing lifecycle and state

In this chapter

• Understanding application processes and users
• Exploring Activity lifecycle
• Handling Activity instance state
• Understanding tasks and task affinity

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Marcus Aurelius

All Android applications are created equal. This isn’t some ideological ideal; it’s a truth born out of necessity. Many Android devices—as we’ve already noted a few times but will hammer home again even at the risk of repetition—have limited memory, CPU power, and other resources. Because of these factors, when the platform was created, the design had to include a way to give the most important processes the resources they needed, and at the ...