Chapter 6. The Android Lifecycle

In this chapter, we will get familiar with the lifecycle of an Android app. At first, this might sound a bit strange, that a computer program has a lifecycle, but it will make sense soon.

The lifecycle is the way that all Android apps interact with the Android OS. Just like the lifecycle of humans interacts with the world around them, we have no choice but to interact with it, and we must be prepared to handle different events without notice if we want our apps to survive.

We will see the phases of the lifecycle that an app goes through, from creation to destruction, and how this helps us know where to put out Java code, depending on what we are trying to achieve.

In brief, in this chapter, we will look at the following:

• The life and times of an Android app
• What is method overriding? And the @Override keyword
• The phases of the Android lifecycle
• What exactly we need to know and do to code our apps
• A lifecycle demonstration mini app
• Code structure, ready...