Question

I’m fairly new to android, but I’ve noticed that pretty much every tutorial begins with this:

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
   super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

But I don’t want the state to persist throughout relaunching the app. I want the user to start at the beginning if they relaunch the app. How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

In Android, state management is up to you during the Activity lifecycle. The onCreate, onPause, onDestroy and other lifecycle methods are all available to save and restore activity state and do other things. If you don’t want your app to save any state, whether it be text boxes or animations or what not then don’t capture it and restore it in these events.

Bundle savedInstanceState is only set by you when the activity is paused or stopped allowing you to store state and grab it in the onCreate or onResume methods, but that also happens on orientation change of the layout (the user tips from portrait to landscape) and then you probably do want to save state details in that Bundle.

And of course you could always reset any fields overriding onResume.

Also, the Activity Launch Modes might be worth looking at. A lot of times I will set my main activity to singleTop to have only one instance launched at any given time.