How to detect when an Android app goes to the background and come back to the foreground

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

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

class AppLifecycleListener : LifecycleObserver {

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

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

// register observer
ProcessLifecycleOwner.get().lifecycle.addObserver(AppLifecycleListener())

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

Also using this feature requires the dependencies:

implementation "androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-extensions:$lifecycleVersion"