Static singleton lifetime in Android

Question

I have some unclear situation:

Will static singletons be garbage collected after last reference holding Activity has been destroyed? Because there is no more referen

Answer 1

You can not control when exactly Java objects become garbage collected. An object becomes eligible for garbage collection when there are no more (non-circular) references to it. With Android, further, you can not control when your Activity gets removed from memory.

singletons are supposed to represent something which always exist.

• You can't force any object to be garbage collected; you can request that the garbage collector runs with System.gc() but it's only a request.

• If you want to make a "singleton" eligible for garbage collection, you'd probably want to have a method to set the static variable to null (and hope that nothing else had taken a copy of the reference). Obviously the next time anyone asked for an instance, it would need to be recreated. at which point it's not really a singleton, of course.