Question

My application starts with a welcome screen Activity, but that screen has an option to skip that screen altogether in future launches.

What’s the proper Android way to do this? Initially, I just automatically detected the skipWelcome preference and switched to the 2nd activity from Welcome. But this had the effect of allowing the user to hit the back button to the welcome screen we promised never to show again.

Right now, in the Welcome activity, I read the preference and call finish() on the current activity:

    SharedPreferences preferences = getPreferences(MODE_PRIVATE);
    boolean skipWelcome = preferences.getBoolean("skipWelcome", false);

    if (skipWelcome) {
        this.finish();
    } 

And then I implement onDestroy to move on to the next Activity:

@Override
public void onDestroy() {
    super.onDestroy();
    startActivity(new Intent(Welcome.this, StartFoo.class));
}

But this makes for some weird visual transitions. I’m starting to think that I need a base Activity that pops open Welcome only if proper, and then goes to StartFoo.

Answer 1

There are a few solutions to this.

Did you try just launching the activity and finishing? I vauguely remember that working, but I could be wrong.

More correctly, in if(skipWelcome) you can start the new activity for result, then when onActivityResult is called, immidiately finish the welcome activity.

Or, you can have your launcher activity not have a view (don’t set content), and launch either the welcome activity or StartFoo.