31.2 The “Old” Architecture

In the chapter entitled “Creating an Example Android App in Android Studio”, an Android project was created consisting of a single activity which contained all of the code for presenting and managing the user interface together with the back-end logic of the app. Up until the introduction of Jetpack, the most common architecture followed this paradigm with apps consisting of multiple activities (one for each screen within the app) with each activity class to some degree mixing user interface and back-end code.

This approach led to a range of problems related to the lifecycle of an app (for example an activity is destroyed and recreated each time the user rotates the device leading to the loss of any app data that had not been saved to some form of persistent storage) as well as issues such inefficient navigation involving launching a new activity for each app screen accessed by the user.