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

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 :)