How to detect when an Android app goes to the back

Question

I am trying to write an app that does something specific when it is brought back to the foreground after some amount of time. Is there a way to detect when an app is sent to the background or brought to the foreground?

Answer 1

ProcessLifecycleOwner seems to be a promising solution also.

ProcessLifecycleOwner will dispatch ON_START, ON_RESUME events, as a first activity moves through these events. ON_PAUSE, ON_STOP, events will be dispatched with a delay after a last activity passed through them. This delay is long enough to guarantee that ProcessLifecycleOwner won't send any events if activities are destroyed and recreated due to a configuration change.

An implementation can be as simple as

public class AppLifecycleListener implements LifecycleObserver {

    @OnLifecycleEvent(Lifecycle.Event.ON_START)
    public void onMoveToForeground() {
        // app moved to foreground
    }

    @OnLifecycleEvent(Lifecycle.Event.ON_STOP)
    public void onMoveToBackground() {
       // app moved to background
    }
}

// register observer
ProcessLifecycleOwner.get().getLifecycle().addObserver(new AppLifecycleListener());

According to source code, current delay value is 700ms.

Answer 2

You can use:

protected void onRestart ()

To differ between new starts and restarts.

Answer 3

Here is my solution. Just register this ActivityLifecycleCallbacks in your main Application class. In the comments, I mention a user profile Activity edge case. That Activity is simply one with transparent edges.

/**
 * This class used Activity lifecycle callbacks to determine when the application goes to the
 * background as well as when it is brought to the foreground.
 */
public class Foreground implements Application.ActivityLifecycleCallbacks
{
    /**
     * How long to wait before checking onStart()/onStop() count to determine if the app has been
     * backgrounded.
     */
    public static final long BACKGROUND_CHECK_DELAY_MS = 500;

    private static Foreground sInstance;

    private final Handler mMainThreadHandler = new Handler(Looper.getMainLooper());
    private boolean mIsForeground = false;
    private int mCount;

    public static void init(final Application application)
    {
        if (sInstance == null)
        {
            sInstance = new Foreground();
            application.registerActivityLifecycleCallbacks(sInstance);
        }
    }

    public static Foreground getInstance()
    {
        return sInstance;
    }

    public boolean isForeground()
    {
        return mIsForeground;
    }

    public boolean isBackground()
    {
        return !mIsForeground;
    }

    @Override
    public void onActivityStarted(final Activity activity)
    {
        mCount++;

        // Remove posted Runnables so any Meteor disconnect is cancelled if the user comes back to
        // the app before it runs.
        mMainThreadHandler.removeCallbacksAndMessages(null);

        if (!mIsForeground)
        {
            mIsForeground = true;
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void onActivityStopped(final Activity activity)
    {
        mCount--;

        // A transparent Activity like community user profile won't stop the Activity that launched
        // it. If you launch another Activity from the user profile or hit the Android home button,
        // there are two onStops(). One for the user profile and one for its parent. Remove any
        // posted Runnables so we don't get two session ended events.
        mMainThreadHandler.removeCallbacksAndMessages(null);
        mMainThreadHandler.postDelayed(new Runnable()
        {
            @Override
            public void run()
            {
                if (mCount == 0)
                {
                    mIsForeground = false;
                }
            }
        }, BACKGROUND_CHECK_DELAY_MS);
    }

    @Override
    public void onActivityCreated(final Activity activity, final Bundle savedInstanceState)
    {

    }

    @Override
    public void onActivityResumed(final Activity activity)
    {

    }

    @Override
    public void onActivityPaused(final Activity activity)
    {

    }

    @Override
    public void onActivitySaveInstanceState(final Activity activity, final Bundle outState)
    {

    }

    @Override
    public void onActivityDestroyed(final Activity activity)
    {

    }
}

Answer 4

This appears to be one of the most complicated questions in Android since (as of this writing) Android doesn't have iOS equivalents of applicationDidEnterBackground() or applicationWillEnterForeground() callbacks. I used an AppState Library that was put together by @jenzz.

[AppState is] a simple, reactive Android library based on RxJava that monitors app state changes. It notifies subscribers every time the app goes into background and comes back into foreground.

It turned out this is exactly what I needed, especially because my app had multiple activities so simply checking onStart() or onStop() on an activity wasn't going to cut it.

First I added these dependencies to gradle:

dependencies {
    compile 'com.jenzz.appstate:appstate:3.0.1'
    compile 'com.jenzz.appstate:adapter-rxjava2:3.0.1'
}

Then it was a simple matter of adding these lines to an appropriate place in your code:

//Note that this uses RxJava 2.x adapter. Check the referenced github site for other ways of using observable
Observable<AppState> appState = RxAppStateMonitor.monitor(myApplication);
//where myApplication is a subclass of android.app.Application
appState.subscribe(new Consumer<AppState>() {
    @Override
    public void accept(@io.reactivex.annotations.NonNull AppState appState) throws Exception {
        switch (appState) {
            case FOREGROUND:
                Log.i("info","App entered foreground");
                break;
            case BACKGROUND:
                Log.i("info","App entered background");
                break;
        }
    }
});

Depending on how you subscribe to the observable, you may have to unsubscribe from it to avoid memory leaks. Again more info on the github page.

Answer 5

Since I did not find any approach, which also handles rotation without checking time stamps, I thought I also share how we now do it in our app. The only addition to this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/42679191/5119746 is, that we also take the orientation into consideration.

class MyApplication : Application(), Application.ActivityLifecycleCallbacks {

   // Members

   private var mAppIsInBackground = false
   private var mCurrentOrientation: Int? = null
   private var mOrientationWasChanged = false
   private var mResumed = 0
   private var mPaused = 0

Then, for the callbacks we have the resume first:

   // ActivityLifecycleCallbacks

   override fun onActivityResumed(activity: Activity?) {

      mResumed++

      if (mAppIsInBackground) {

         // !!! App came from background !!! Insert code

         mAppIsInBackground = false
      }
      mOrientationWasChanged = false
    }

And onActivityStopped:

   override fun onActivityStopped(activity: Activity?) {

       if (mResumed == mPaused && !mOrientationWasChanged) {

       // !!! App moved to background !!! Insert code

        mAppIsInBackground = true
    }

And then, here comes the addition: Checking for orientation changes:

   override fun onConfigurationChanged(newConfig: Configuration) {

       if (newConfig.orientation != mCurrentOrientation) {
           mCurrentOrientation = newConfig.orientation
           mOrientationWasChanged = true
       }
       super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig)
   }

That's it. Hope this helps someone :)

Answer 6

This is my solution https://github.com/doridori/AndroidUtils/blob/master/App/src/main/java/com/doridori/lib/app/ActivityCounter.java

Basically involved counting the lifecycle methods for all Activity's with a timer to catch cases where there is no activity currently in the foreground but the app is (i.e. on rotation)