How to finish every activity on the stack except the first in Android

Question

I'm porting an iPhone app to Android and I can't seem to find a means to pop each activity on the stack except the root activity.

In objective-c I would do something like the below

[navController popToRootViewControllerAnimated:YES];

Anyone know if I can effectively call "finish()" on each activity after some action?

Answer 1

If you want to start one Activity, say, your homescreen, and remove every other Activity in your application's stack, you can use:

Intent intent = new Intent(this, MainActivity.class);
intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP); // Removes other Activities from stack
startActivity(intent);

If you also want to provide this event in the MainActivity (such as a logo click in the title bar), you can add the FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP flag as well to make sure it does not add another instance of itself to the stack.

Answer 2

Look at http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html#FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP: you can startActivity on the root activity with this flag, and it will blow away all activities above it. You should read the docs carefully about the intent delivery behavior.