Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, 2nd Edition
by Bill Phillips, Chris Stewart, Brian Hardy, Kristin Marsicano
Tasks and the Back Stack
Android uses tasks to keep track of the user’s state within each running application. Each application opened from Android’s default launcher app gets its own task. This is the desired behavior but, unfortunately for your NerdLauncher, it is not the default behavior. Before you foray into forcing applications to launch into their own tasks, let’s discuss what tasks are and how they work.
A task is a stack of activities that the user is concerned with. The activity at the bottom of the stack is called the base activity, and whatever activity is on top is the activity that the user sees. When you press the Back button, you are popping the top activity off of this stack. If you are looking at the base activity ...
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