Re-launch of Activity on Home button, but…only the first time

Question

The application that I am developing has a weird behavior the first time that it is installed. If the user backs out of the application normally the first time, it will fore

Answer 1

Welcome to the ever-growing list of users who have been bitten by this one.

This is a well-known and long-standing Android bug. in the way applications get launched the first time from the installer, web-browser and via IDE (IntelliJ, Eclipse, etc.). See these issues filed long ago related to the problem:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2373

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=26658

It is still broken and you cannot prevent this from happening. The only thing you can do is to detect when Android has launched a second instance of your root activity into an existing task. You can do this by putting this code in onCreate() of your root activity:

if (!isTaskRoot()) {
    // Android launched another instance of the root activity into an existing task
    //  so just quietly finish and go away, dropping the user back into the activity
    //  at the top of the stack (ie: the last state of this task)
    finish();
    return;
}