How to destroy an activity in Android?

Question

While the application is running, I press the HOME button to close the application. When I start the application again, it resumes on the page displayed prior to clicking on HOME. I want the application to start with the initial display instead. I have used finish() to finish the activity but it is not working. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Most likely you have several instances of the same activity. To resolve this kind of issues create your own parent Activity class e.g. MyRootActivity which will hold static list of all of available/alive activities:

public class MyRootActivity extends Activity
{
    private static final String TAG=MyRootActivity.class.getName();
    private static ArrayList<Activity> activities=new ArrayList<Activity>();


    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
    {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        activities.add(this);
    }

    @Override
    public void onDestroy()
    {
        super.onDestroy();
        activities.remove(this);
    }

    public static void finishAll()
    {
        for(Activity activity:activities)
           activity.finish();
    }
}

For that all of your activities need to be children of MyRootActivity.

Then when you are about to sure that you're closing your application - just call MyRootActivity.finishAll();