How do I programmatically “restart” an Android app?

Question

Firstly, I know that one should not really kill/restart an application on Android. In my use case, I want to factory-reset my application in a specific case where a server s

Answer 1

You can use startInstrumentation method of Activity. You need implement empty Instrumentation and pointed in manifest. After that you can call this method for restart your app. Like this:

try {           
    InstrumentationInfo info = getPackageManager().queryInstrumentation(getPackageName(), 0).get(0);
    ComponentName component = new ComponentName(this, Class.forName(info.name));
    startInstrumentation(component, null, null);
} catch (Throwable e) {             
    new RuntimeException("Failed restart with Instrumentation", e);
}

I get Instrumentation class name dynamically but you can hardcode it. Some like this:

try {           
    startInstrumentation(new ComponentName(this, RebootInstrumentation.class), null, null); 
} catch (Throwable e) {             
    new RuntimeException("Failed restart with Instrumentation", e);
}

Call startInstrumentation make reload of your app. Read description of this method. But it can be not safe if acting like kill app.