Most of my activities load dynamic data from a server, and when the page comes back into focus, i reload it anyway. It seems wasteful to keep them around if I’m just going to reload them, so I thought of calling finish() on them if the user navigates away from the page.
Its confusing if some activities you can press the back button to go to and others no because I’ve called finish() on them, so I was wondering if its bad practice just to call finish() on all activities the user navigates away from? (I have a navigation bar at the bottom of every activity so the back button isnt necessary). Or, is it better practice not to call finish() on any of the activities and just hope they dont slow down the phone and that the OS will take care of garbage collecting them?
I’m new to Android programming and and don’t have an Android phone so i’m not sure what is the common/best practice in this situation, or if its just a matter of personal taste.
Also, is it possible to instruct Android to keep a history of activities so that the back button still works, but finish() them when they navigate away so that they’re not needlessly taking up resources?
While you may reload all your data on returning to the activity, there is still no point on calling
finish().When activities are hidden, they do not use resources, and are of no real problem. Just leave them as is, and then when the user navigates back, it will reload it as required.
In this state, they can also be garbage collected if required – which is all taken care of by android.