In one of my Android application, I was storing some data in a static member variable. After few hours of inactivity, when I used to open the application, I would see that all the data I had stored in the static member variable was gone.
I know about the Android Activity life cycle and that Android can unload Activity class if it is not active. However I did not think that it would reset all static members too. So I had three options to persist data -
- Store it in preferences
- In a file (local or on external media)
- In the database
- In the Android application class
See this article for more details about data storage options in Android. Since the data is not large and I did not already have Android database created for this app (this app does use database, but it’s HTML5 database), I decided to use option #4. Storing in application class also suited this application because I do not need the data if Android or user kills the application.
So, be very careful when using static variables in Activity class.
-Ram Kulkarni
