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

This is pretty easy with ProcessLifecycleOwner

Add these dependencies

implementation "android.arch.lifecycle:extensions:$project.archLifecycleVersion"
kapt "android.arch.lifecycle:compiler:$project.archLifecycleVersion"

In Kotlin:

class ForegroundBackgroundListener : LifecycleObserver {


    @OnLifecycleEvent(Lifecycle.Event.ON_START)
    fun startSomething() {
        Log.v("ProcessLog", "APP IS ON FOREGROUND")
    }

    @OnLifecycleEvent(Lifecycle.Event.ON_STOP)
    fun stopSomething() {
        Log.v("ProcessLog", "APP IS IN BACKGROUND")
    }
}

Then in your base activity:

override fun onCreate() {
        super.onCreate()

        ProcessLifecycleOwner.get()
                .lifecycle
                .addObserver(
                        ForegroundBackgroundListener()
                                .also { appObserver = it })
    }

See my article on this topic: https://medium.com/@egek92/how-to-actually-detect-foreground-background-changes-in-your-android-application-without-wanting-9719cc822c48