Singletons vs. Application Context in Android?

Question

Recalling this post enumerating several problems of using singletons and having seen several examples of Android applications using singleton pattern, I wonder if it\'s a go

Answer 1

From the proverbial horse's mouth...

When developing your app, you may find it necessary to share data, context or services globally across your app. For example, if your app has session data, such as the currently logged-in user, you will likely want to expose this information. In Android, the pattern for solving this problem is to have your android.app.Application instance own all global data, and then treat your Application instance as a singleton with static accessors to the various data and services.

When writing an Android app, you're guaranteed to only have one instance of the android.app.Application class, and so it's safe (and recommended by Google Android team) to treat it as a singleton. That is, you can safely add a static getInstance() method to your Application implementation. Like so:

public class AndroidApplication extends Application {

    private static AndroidApplication sInstance;

    public static AndroidApplication getInstance(){
        return sInstance;
    }

    @Override
    public void onCreate() {
        super.onCreate();
        sInstance = this;
    }
}