Question

I have written a function to create a splash screen with a 5 second timeout for my app.

The code works fine, but when the timeout reaches zero and I want to redirect to my main activity, the app crashes with the following error:

Only the original thread that created a view hierarchy can touch its views.

So I looked around a bit and someone suggested nesting this inside my function. It seems like a good Idea, but now methods like sleep / stop won’t work.

My code is below, I can provide more / explain more in details if it isn’t clear enough just let me know. Thanks for the help.

        @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        showSplashScreen();

    }

    protected boolean _active = true;
    protected int _splashTime = 5000;  // Splash screen is 5 seconds

    public void showSplashScreen() {

        setContentView(R.layout.splash_layout);

//      Thread splashThread = new Thread() {

         runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {

             @Override
             public void run() {
                 try {
                     int waited = 0;
                     while (_active && (waited < _splashTime)) {
                         Thread.sleep(100);
                         if (_active) {
                             waited += 100;
                         }
                     }
                 } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                     // do nothing
                 } finally {
                     showApplication();
                 }
             }
         });
    }

Answer 1

This will perform sleep on the UI thread. That’s never a good idea.

Why not something like this?

new Handler().postDelayed(new Runnable() {
    public void run() {
        // start application ...
    }
}, _splashTime);

But this answer has a good point. Displaying a splash screen for 5 seconds can be very annoying.