Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, 4th Edition

For the More Curious: Avoiding a Half-Baked Solution

Some people try to address the UI state loss on configuration change bug in their app by disabling rotation. If the user cannot rotate the app, they never lose their UI state, right? That is true – but, sadly, this approach leaves your app prone to other bugs. While this smooths over the rough edge of rotation, it leaves other lifecycle bugs that users will surely encounter, but that will not necessarily present themselves during development and testing.

First, there are other configuration changes that can occur at runtime, such as window resizing and night mode changes. And yes, you could also capture and ignore or handle those changes. But this is just bad practice – it disables ...