Why a viewmodel factory is needed in Android?

Question

We have been discussing about this but we don\'t know the reason of creating a viewmodel factory to create a viewmodel instead of instantiate the viewmodel directly. What is

Answer 1

We have been discussing about this but we don't know the reason of creating a viewmodel factory to create a viewmodel instead of instantiate the viewmodel directly. What is the gain of creating a factory that just creates the viewmodel?

Because Android will only give you a new instance if it's not yet created for that specific given ViewModelStoreOwner.

Let's also not forget that ViewModels are kept alive across configuration changes, so if you rotate the phone, you're not supposed to create a new ViewModel.

If you are going back to a previous Activity and you re-open this Activity, then the previous ViewModel should receive onCleared() and the new Activity should have a new ViewModel.

Unless you're doing that yourself, you should probably just trust the ViewModelProviders.Factory to do its job.

(And you need the factory because you typically don't just have a no-arg constructor, your ViewModel has constructor arguments, and the ViewModelProvider must know how to fill out the constructor arguments when you're using a non-default constructor).