Android App Exit Button

Question

I\'m not sure whether I need to add an exit button to my app. Is there any point to doing this? And if on exiting one activity or service is not .finish() or closed properly

Answer 1

Anyone who says you don't need an exit button is right but putting one in never hurts. Users like to see a way to exit to the application, it's not about bad programming, it's actually about proper programming, give the user an exit button and if they never use it great and if it's there even better.

Answer 2

From a technical perspective, no, you don't need to add a quit button for all the very good reasons listed here.

Unfortunately users aren't informed in this way and regularly drop review scores because they have to 'use a task killer' or 'force close' your app.

It is a regular request and criticism in reviews/feedback for my app. So it may be necessary to appease users.

Answer 3

You don't need to add en exit button. If you don't, your activity will just be kept in memory until the system reclaims it. It will not consume any cpu.

Of course, if you have any worker threads running you should stop them in onStop() or onPause(), depending on what your threads are doing.

Many applications add an exit button, for some reason. I guess the reason is that they don't trust themselves to write proper code or they don't trust the Android OS to clean up properly.

Not going through the correct finish procedures will not cause any damage to others than yourself.

Answer 4

Guys you're righteous, but there are some cases when Exit button may have a sense. Let's say you're keeping some application-wide global data in YourApplication class (child of Application), e.g. some sensitive data or so. When user closes final activity and it's destroyed Application won't be terminated. As read Android developer resource - developer should not rely on Application.onTerminate() method. You can easily check it - even in case when all activities closed Application still alive. Whenever Application instance alive it's relatively easy to get access to those object and collect data.

I have found 2 ways how to kill Application class instance:

1. null'ate all object references (which is hardly possible for large projects) then call garbage collection

2. call

   android.os.Process.killProcess(android.os.Process.myPid());

So Exit button may have function to finish all activities, call garbage collection then call killProcess() - which will guarantee safe removing of global data stored in Application.