Application Development

for Android

Android Lifecycle

May 23, 2023

 What is the Android Lifecycle?
• Android apps have a “lifecycle” just like people do
• The OS itself controls this lifecycle: example: You are using
the Twitter app and then take an important phone call, the
Twitter app disappears from the screen
• Android decides when certain apps should shutdown when
they are running in the background
• As programmers we must be aware of this lifecycle
 The Different Phases
• Android system has multiple distinct phases and these
change how the app is used
• It essentially uses this because phones are dependent on
battery life and have less processing power than desktops
• So it is important for the OS to “close” unused apps to prevent
them from draining the battery
• Each app can be in a different phase of it’s life: created,
started, resumed, paused, stopped, destroyed
 The Different Phases II
• When the user first starts an app it is “created” and the code
inside onCreate runs
• After it is “started” then it “resumes” and then it is considered
“running”
• This may seem strange but the first time we launch an app it
still “starts’ ->”resumes” -> “runs”
• Each of these phases have their own special methods like
onCreate that can run
 The Different Phases in Reverse
• Similarly, when an app closes or is shutdown we get different
lifecycles
• For example if we take a phone call while using the Twitter
app we go through the pause and then the stop phase
• If the app stays in the background long enough or gets closed
by the user it enters the “destroy” phase
The Android Lifecycle
 Why should we care?
• The lifecycles of an Android app won’t play a huge role in this
course but it’s still important to know
• Imagine we’ve created an app for taking notes and the user is
writing a long note
• Then the user takes a phone call and your app goes into the
background and they forget about it
• When they return to the app, the user would be mad if the
note they were writing disappeared too…
 Handling the Lifecycle
• Each of the lifecycle events we’ve seen has a special method
we can code in
• For example, the onDestroy method will run when the app is
about to be shut down
• This would allow us to write code to save some last minute
information
• So we could write code that saves the note they were working
on in a temp directory in case of sudden shutdown