StrictMode activity instance count violation (2 instances, 1 expected) on rotation of completely empty activity

Question

Relevant only in that it motivates eliminating any false positives from strict mode, since the continued presence of any makes the death penalty impractical

Over t

Answer 1

I am not an Android developer so this is a bit of a shot in the dark.

Presumably since the behaviour is not consistent for other activities, but is triggered nonetheless by a completely trivial one, the issue is down to the time taken for onCreate to complete.

If onCreate can complete before the pause/stop/destroy sequence is finished (and eventual garbage collection though it need not get quite to that point afaics) for the old activity then there really will be two instances present.

A simple solution to prevent this is for the activity to have a static atomicboolean "ready" (initially false) that check before doing anything else in onCreate where you'd loop

while(!ready.compareAndSet(false, true)) {
    //sleep a bit
}

then override the ondestroy lifecycle callback and invoke ready.compareAndSet(true, false)

Apologies if this approach is utterly naive.