How to manage multiple Activity stacks in an Android app, like you would on iOS with multiple UINavigationControllers within a UITabBarController?

A fairly common model for iOS apps seems to have a single UITabBarController, where each tab essentially holds a UINavigationController, i.e. a stack of controllers, and pressing a tab switches to the top of the corresponding stack. Can I get the same behavior on Android without a lot of custom code? (Note: I am using menus instead of tabs on Android).

After reading http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals/tasks-and-back-stack.html the closest I can see is to have multiple tasks, each one representing a stack (akin to UINavigationController), and to use FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK to switch to another task/stack. When I switch, is there a way to go straight to the top of the stack, or do I need to keep that piece of state myself?

One problem开发者_StackOverflow社区 with keeping that state myself: I've noticed that if my app launches an Intent that starts a new process, sometimes my original app's process is killed (I think), and all of my global state is destroyed.

The only other solution I can imagine is to have a dummy Activity per stack, to push DummyActivityN essentially right before I switch away from the Nth stack, and, when switching to the Mth stack, to start activity DummyActivityM with FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK, and then have DummyActivityM immediately finish() itself.

One last problem: as I navigate to the bottom of one of the stacks, with the back button, I would like to hit the back button once more and NOT go to another stack/task. But this seems easy to overcome by launching an Intent to go to the home screen; is there anything better?

If I understood your problem correctly, if you add this parameter to your Activity declarations in AndroidManifest.xml, the Activities that are launched by your custom menu will be only created once - keeping their state while you move around the tabs.

android:launchMode="singleTask" 

I hope this helps,

Best,

-sekran