Finish parent and current activity in Android

Question

I have 3 activities. Activity A which leads to activity B, which in turn can go back to activity A or start activity C. However, if I press back in activity C the app should

Answer 1

You can just override the back key behavior:

Activity A starts activity B
Pressing Back on activity B should lead to A
Activity B starts activity C
Pressing Back on activity C should close the app

Note that I don't call super from onBackPressed. This also allows you to override the browse stack mechanism for Android, which I find to be a big advantage, since currently there doesn't seem to be a way to clear the single oldest item from the browse stack in a simple way.

public class B extends Activity
{
    ...
    @Override
    public void onBackPressed()
    {
        // Start activity A
        Intent aIntent = new Intent(this, A);
        startActivity(bIntent);
    }
    ...
}

public class C extends Activity
{
    ...
    @Override
    public void onBackPressed()
    {
        // Close
        finish();
    }
    ...
}

You can specifically finish the parent activity if needed too, but using this method, you don't have to worry about it.