Removing an activity from the history stack

Solution 1:

You can achieve this by setting the android:noHistory attribute to "true" in the relevant <activity> entries in your AndroidManifest.xml file. For example:

<activity
    android:name=".AnyActivity"
    android:noHistory="true" />

Solution 2:

You can use forwarding to remove the previous activity from the activity stack while launching the next one. There's an example of this in the APIDemos, but basically all you're doing is calling finish() immediately after calling startActivity().

Solution 3:

Yes, have a look at Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NO_HISTORY.

Solution 4:

This is likely not the ideal way to do it. If someone has a better way, I will be looking forward to implementing it. Here's how I accomplished this specific task with pre-version-11 sdk.

in each class you want to go away when it's clear time, you need to do this:

    ... interesting code stuff ...
    Intent i = new Intent(MyActivityThatNeedsToGo.this, NextActivity.class);
    startActivityForResult(i, 0);
}

@Override
protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
    super.onActivityResult(requestCode, resultCode, data);
    if (resultCode == R.string.unwind_stack_result_id) {
        this.setResult(R.string.unwind_stack_result_id);
        this.finish();
    }
}

then the one that needs to set off the chain of pops from the stack needs to just call this when you want to initiate it:

NextActivity.this.setResult(R.string.unwind_stack_result_id);
NextActivity.this.finish();

Then the activities aren't on the stack!
Remember folks, that you can start an activity, and then begin cleaning up behind it, execution does not follow a single (the ui) thread.