Android Standalone: Home screen app icon restarts app from start

If my app is backgrounded and you click on the app icon on the Android home screen, it doesn’t resume from where it left off but starts again from the first screen. Is this the intended behaviour?

I’m seeing this consistently across all Android devices I’ve tried, it doesn’t happen on iOS.

It doesn’t seem to be a memory issue or length of time running, it happens every time no matter how long the app was backgrounded for, including on devices with plenty of RAM.

This is perhaps confirmed by the fact that if you use the Android square/tasks button to switch back to it (rather than home screen icon), then it’s still there and you can resume where you left off. It’s like clicking the app icon on Android doesn’t trigger a resume but rather a fresh instance.

SDK version is 28.

Steps to reproduce:

  • Press app icon to run app, navigate away from first screen
  • Press Home button to show Android home screen
  • Press app icon to run app → app has reverted to the first screen

What does work:

  • Press app icon to run app, navigate away from first screen
  • Press Home button to show Android home screen
  • Press Square button to show task list, choose app → app resumes successfully where it left off!

Is this intentional?

1 Like

Is this a standalone app? Maybe android - App restarts rather than resumes - Stack Overflow would help?

Hi Nikki,

It’s a standalone Android app but not detached - can I change launchMode without detaching?

Thanks a lot

Possibly related to:

Just to add a bit more data to this:

It doesn’t restart the app from the start if I click on a push notification - that works fine.
But clicking on the app icon restarts from the beginning.

That seems pretty conclusive that it hasn’t run out of memory etc, it’s just the method by which it was launched.

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