How to finish every activity on the stack except the first in Android

Question

I'm porting an iPhone app to Android and I can't seem to find a means to pop each activity on the stack except the root activity.

In objective-c I would do something like the below

[navController popToRootViewControllerAnimated:YES];

Anyone know if I can effectively call "finish()" on each activity after some action?

I'm not 100% sure of what you're asking, but it's definitely safe to call `finish()` on an `Activity` once you're done with it. That will bring you back to whichever activity is before it in the stack. — dmon, Jun 09 '11 at 19:43
finish() will only pop back one level from the navigation stack — user1872384, Sep 01 '15 at 09:53

score 40 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 09 '11 at 19:42

If you want to start one Activity, say, your homescreen, and remove every other Activity in your application's stack, you can use:

Intent intent = new Intent(this, MainActivity.class);
intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP); // Removes other Activities from stack
startActivity(intent);

If you also want to provide this event in the MainActivity (such as a logo click in the title bar), you can add the FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP flag as well to make sure it does not add another instance of itself to the stack.

it recreates first activity, I mean it calls `onCreate()` of `MainActivity` — Mike Herasimov, Jul 08 '16 at 19:59

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 09 '11 at 19:44

Look at http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html#FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP: you can startActivity on the root activity with this flag, and it will blow away all activities above it. You should read the docs carefully about the intent delivery behavior.

How to finish every activity on the stack except the first in Android

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