Stop user from going back to MANY previous activities in Android

Question

I am have an Android app with 3 Activities.

Activity 1:

--Button Signup1

--Button Signup2

Activity 2:

--Button CreateAccount

Activity 3:

The flow goes like this:

Activity_______UserAction____________Result

1____________click SignUp1____________Move to Act2

2____________click CreateAccount_____Move to Act3

3

What I want to know is when I got to Activity 3, how can I prevent user from going back to ALL the previous activities, not just the immediate previous one (activity2).

I have looked around and people have always recommended calling finish() after startActivity() in Activity2. But that won't work since android will direct user back to activity1.

In addition to that, in Activity1, I don't want to call finish() after startActivity() because I want to let users come back to Activity1 from Activity2 (say, they want to use SignUp2 instead).

To sum up, only when the user reaches Activity3, should they be prevented from going back to any other previous activities.

How do I achieve that?

Answer 1

You can try adding this flags to Activity3 intent:

intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP|Intent.FLAG_A‌​CTIVITY_NEW_TASK);

This should force to clear Activity backstack

Answer 2

 @Override
public void onBackPressed() {
    super.onBackPressed();}

using this you can exactly tell android what to do in case of back pressed.

Also it would a good idea if u could override your onPause and onDestroy method as per your requirements,please go through android lifecycle for better clarity on this

Answer 3

If you're only worried about navigation between the activities using the device's back button then, given the limitations as presented, you should be able to achieve what you want by overriding Activity's onBackPressed() method. Make sure the implementation is empty, like this:

@Override public void onBackPressed() { /* Empty */ }

This will prevent Android's standard implementation of onBackPressed(), which finishes the activity, from running.

Answer 4

Start your activity with these flags:

(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP | Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TASK | Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK)