Question

I have a kid’s app for Android and there are some unique considerations for this application since the app has basically no navigation (it’s for young kids). I do not want to break my app UI (which has been successful on iPhone) by adding a quit/restart button.

What I really need is fairly simple — I want my activity/app to start clean and new every single time it starts. Whether it’s an initial load or whatever — basically any time onResume is called I want a completely fresh instance of my app.

I initially thought I could just exit/quit/finish the app when the user leaves. But I haven’t found a way to do this that doesn’t cause crashes on start. Also every thread/stack overflow post about that idea is filled with people wagging their fingers and saying you should never ever quit an app on android.

If I can’t quit the app onExit, is there something I can do to restart my activity every time onResume is called? (or would that be an infinite loop?).

Would greatly appreciate any help!

Answer 1

Try starting your main activity in onResume, and clearing the activity stack:

public void onResume() {
    super.onResume();
    startActivity(new Intent(this, MainScreen.class).addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NO_HISTORY).addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP));
}

maybe these aren’t the correctl flags to add, but check out the other Intent flags and this could do what you want!

intent flags documentation