This issue has been causing serious problems for users of my audiobook player application on 2.1 phones. The problems with the activity life cycle cause corresponding problems with the service life cycle.
A service allows onStart to be called multiple times for the same service instance. This is normal expected behavior for a service. But when the start and stop intents being given to the service get reordered it causes serious problems. This is because the sequence: Service.onCreate Service.onStart Service.onStart Service.onDestroy is a valid sequence to execute on a service, and even though onStart is called multiple times it is correct behavior that the service to be destroyed on the first stop service command. Take the simple case where an activity starts a service in onCreate and stops the service in onDestroy. Bringing up the activity two times should result in the following sequence: 1st use Activity.onCreate (starts service) Service.onCreate Service.onStart Activity.finish Activity.onDestroy (stops service) Service.onDestroy 2nd use Activity.onCreate (starts service) Service.onCreate Service.onStart Activity.finish Activity.onDestroy (stops service) Service.onDestroy Because of this activity life cycle bug the following is occurring on 2.1 phones: 1st use Activity.onCreate (starts service) Service.onCreate Service.onStart Activity.finish (the destroy gets delayed) 2nd use Activity.onCreate (starts service) Service.onStart (service still exists) delayed Activity.onDestroy (stops service) Service.onDestroy At this point the 2nd activity instance is running but the service is it using has now been destroyed. The point at which the service gets destroyed randomly occurs when the delayed Activity.onDestroy was called. The way I plan to work around this issue is to change my activity to send the stop service intent just prior to calling Activity.finish. This way the stop service intent will be executed at the correct point in time even if the activity onStop and onDestroy get delayed until later. This problem has been difficult to track down not having a 2.1 device myself. I should have validation from some of my customers soon as to whether this work around resolves the problems they have been having. -- 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
