Androidology - Part 2 of 3 - Application Lifecycle

Part 2 of 3 in an overview series on the Android platform. In this segment, Mike explains the application and process lifecycle as a user navigates through different applications.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• android
• mobile
• development

[admwiggin]

Right. It appears that it only terminates processes when it requires the space for other more pertinent processes. That way, if you wanted to go right back to the Browser after closing the last window and going back to your mail, it opens up nice and quick. Google's done a very good job of all this, from what I can see.

[cybernytrix]

Hhow about simply using the swap? the text segments (CS) of the process are anyway on disk/flash. the only parts are the program's DS. so you purge the memory pages for the CS and put the DS on disk - probably even compress it. Fairly automatic if you are using Linux...

Manually saving state for the app can be buggy, what if you forgot to save something? how can you QA this type of bug??

[garfonkee]

So does this mean there's only one stack available at a time? If so, I guess that's sort of like how mobile phones really are now, but I was just curious if it's possible at all to multitask (have more than one stack)?

Maybe there just isn't enough space available in the screen to do such thing, but nevertheless I'm curious.

[CONSTM63]

Guess, it's the intent. memory slot(cache?) is still available up to purge time.

[Nick87Neger]

Probably they just use some default Java techniques, which means that they use the garbage collection future which comes with Java. This garbage collection future only cleans up the unused memory when it needs more memory. Since the whole phone OS is running in one runtime they probably use reflection to start a new 'application' but this application is not more than just a module which will be loaded in the existing runtime library.

[huseurdaddy]

LoL, notice around 07:20, the browser process wasn't terminated! It will be fun to see if it was really a presentation mistake or an intended OS mechanism such that it only terminates processes as needed.