Question

I have an activity that is triggered by a notification (when the user clicks).

1) When there is no other activity (from my app) alive, the activity does not rotate when the orientation changes. OnCreate() does not get called

2) When another activity is running (below), then when I rotate the device onCreate() gets called once but the activity dies immediately. No error logged

I can’t see anything special in my activity but the fact that it is triggered by a notification and that it has a broadcast receiver in it (private class).

Thank you for your thoughts

EDIT: Please discard this question. I had a finish() in onStop().

Answer 1

Add a log statement in the Activity.onCreate() method that is dying. More likely is your activity is being recreated and something is tossing an exception. If you see the onCreate() statement in the logs twice then you know you likely having an exception being thrown. Even without it you can trace down which line its dying on by adding more log statements.

On orientation changes you’re activity will be torn down and rebuilt unless you fixed the orientation in the manifest. If a service or broadcast receiver has a reference to it after it’s torn down then any call to it will likely cause it to die as you’re seeing. This is where Android’s lifecycle is more hassle than its worth, but it is what it is.

More than likely something is throwing an exception and you’re not seeing it or its being masked by another one being thrown. Make sure you’re not filtering your logcat output by tag.