Android Distinguish Between App-In-Background and Rotation Event

Issue

My fundamental problem is figuring out how to determine when my app is put into the background vs undergoing a rotation.

I have an audio recording service that is used for music recognition. I want to intelligently manage the lifetime of this service to accomplish the following:

1. Keep the service running during lifecycle events that end up being a device rotation.
2. Stop the service when the app is put into the background (to free up the mic).

I can't override onConfigurationChanged because my app uses actionbar tabs with programatically added fragments and there's no way to re-inflate the fragment layouts.

What is a good way to overcome these challenges? My best solution thus far is updating a timer in the service but I'd like to consider alternatives. I don't like the timer because it's common to have mic contention when using voice search.

Solution

You can call getChangingConfigurations() or isChangingConfigurations() in the onPause(). This would tell you if the orientation is changing. If its not, then its probably going into the background.

Also, you CAN override onCongifurationChanged(), just make sure you call super.onConfigurationChanged() so that the orientation change gets handled by the framework.

Answered By - Spidy