Suddenly stopped hitting onCreate

I have a home screen widget with a button with a pendingIntent. Click it, it bundles a boolean to indicate where it came from and it brings up my main activity.

In my main activity in onCreate, I check for a bundle, if the boolean that says it was launched from my widget is true, I perform an action.

Every time I hit 开发者_运维百科my widget button, it should launch my main activity, and run through onCreate.

And it does, on the emulator. And it did, on my n1. Then suddenly it stopped on my n1. I can still get it to hit onCreate when I launch from the widget but I have force stop or reinstall and then it only does it the first time.

What is going on with this?

What's going on is the Activity lifecycle. Android will keep the same instance of your Activity around so that the user can return to it later. Monitor some of the other lifecycle methods like onStart and onResume to see this in action.

You may see a difference in behavior if the user hits the back button vs. the home button. The back button will finish the current Activity by default, whereas home will leave it alone unless Android decides to kill it for resources later.