"Asking it to finish" means finishing the activity, which means destroying it. Politely asking it to finish isn't going to cause it to just not cleanly exit. It would be fundamentally broken if activities every just stop being used in their process without actually going through the lifecycle.
In other words "asking to finish" -> Activity.finish() -> does what you expect. On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 11:01 PM, Eric <e...@alum.mit.edu> wrote: > > > On Apr 27, 9:27 pm, Dianne Hackborn <hack...@android.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Eric <e...@alum.mit.edu> wrote: > > > Hopefully the documentation can also be updated to > > > remove any doubt whatsoever that an Activity cannot possibly be > > > 'removed' from memory in low-memory situations (when the process is > > > _not_ killed), that would result in an inconsistent or leak state by > > > not having balanced lifecycle methods called. > > > > The only thing that happens in low-memory situations is processes being > > killed. > > Yes, thank you for clarifying that, but unfortunately the > documentation lead one to believe that Activities that are already > paused can somehow be removed from memory by a different mechanism > other than killing the process. For example, > > http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html > > "If an activity is paused or stopped, the system can drop the activity > from memory by either asking it to finish, or simply killing its > process" > > Note the 'either', 'or' language. I assume this situation is meant to > address an Activity stack: > > A1, A2, A3 > > Where A3 was just started, but the system is so low on memory that it > 'drops' the activities A1 and A2 from memory using the nebulous > mechanism described in the documentation. The nebulous mechanism is > described as 'the Activity being asked to finish'. However, my > understanding of 'finishing' an Activity was that once an Activity is > 'finished' it never again returns to the screen unless being > explicitly started again. Therefore, I took the 'finish' in that > above documentation to mean that Android removes the Activity from > memory some other way, where the normal lifecycle is not followed. > Hence the reason why I wrote this post in the first place. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Android Developers" group. > To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en > -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer hack...@android.com Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
