36. Working with Android Lifecycle-Aware Components

The earlier chapter entitled “Understanding Android Application and Activity Lifecycles” described the use of lifecycle methods to track lifecycle state changes within a UI controller such as an activity or fragment. One of the main problems with these methods is that they place the burden of handling lifecycle changes onto the UI controller. On the surface this might seem like the logical approach since the UI controller is, after all, the object going through the state change. The fact is, however, that the code that is typically impacted by the state change invariably resides in other classes within the app. This led to complex code appearing in the UI controller that needed to manage and manipulate other objects in response to changes in lifecycle state. Clearly this is a scenario best avoided when following the Android architectural guidelines.

A much cleaner and logical approach would be for the objects within...