Best Practices for Activity Flow in Android Applications

Question

Trying to understand best practice for the lifecycle of my android application, and how activities fit into it.

For example, I have a main activity, sort of the "home" of my application. But, on start-up there are several activities that I 'might' need to run, depending on several cases, one being that it is the first time the app's been run.

Is best practice to call these 'start-up'/house-keeping activities FROM my 'home' activity? Or should the application begin with a 'house-keeping' activities, do the work, then finish() and start the 'home' activity?

Thanks for advice about this,

-- J

Answer 1

I would set your LAUNCHER <intent-filter> on whatever the user will most likely want to go to from their home screen. Presumably, that would be your "home" activity.

In onCreate() of that activity, make the determination if there is some other activity that is needed (e.g., "first-run"), and call startActivity() on it. When the user presses BACK from there (or you finish() that new activity), control will return to your "home" activity.

Answer 2

For the best user experience (and cleaner code), you really shouldn't chain Activities.

A good best practice for the scenario you describe (needing a particular layout of options on first-launch) is to set a SharedPreference the first time that the "Home" Activity is created. In the same Activity.onCreate() call you should make a decision about what your UI will display based on that saved value (e.g., either set the appropriate View's visibility to View.GONE or choose a different layout.xml altogether).

As an added bonus: You can overload a hypothetical "has been opened" SharedPreference with the version number of the app (e.g., LastOpenedVersion) to be able to present the user with a change log the next time they open your "Home" activity after an upgrade.

Answer 3

One possibility is to start from a splash screen Activity (rather than a "home" one), which then determines what to launch next.

You should also consider if your start-up/house-keeping needs to be accomplished via an Activity. If it is not something that the user interacts with, then you can move that functionality into a Service that runs a separate thread.