android - App completely restarting when launched by icon press in launcher

Question

I'm in the process of trying to make a release build of my first android app to send to a few testers. However, I ran into a problem with it. When you exit the app and then re-enter it by launching it via its icon, it restarts the whole app instead of returning to it's previous location. This occurs even if you re-enter right after exiting. However, it does not happen if I hold the Home button and launch it through the recent apps list.

I've searched online for others having this problem and there are a few, but no one has ever had a solid answer as to why it's happening to them. It's been suggested in old questions to set the launchmode to singletask or singleinstance in the manifest file, but that hasn't helped me, and besides - from what I understand, the default behavior for android is to return to the previous state of the task in this situation, so I don't know why I would need special manifest options to make it do that.

The most bizarre thing about this problem is that if I use eclipse and the debugger to put the app on my phone, this problem does not occur. I don't even need to be connected to the debugger, it seems like as long as I have a debug version of the app, the problem doesn't occur. But if I use a release version (I create it using the Android Tools - Export Signed Application Package menu option in Eclipse), the problem happens. If anyone has any insight as to what is causing this, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Answer 1

I had the same problem with an application and I resolved this behavior adding flag "android:launchMode="singleTop"" instead of "android:launchMode="singleTask"" in the <activity> declaration of your AndroidManifest.xml file. Hope this will help somebody.