Override back button to act like home button

On pressing the back button, I'd like my application to go into the stopped state, rather than the destroyed state.

In the Android docs it states:

>...not all activities have the behavior that they are destroyed when BACK is pressed. When the user starts playing music in the Music application and then presses BACK, the application overrides the normal back behavior, preventing the player activity from being destroyed, and continues playing music, even though its activity is no longer visible

How do I replicate this functionality in my own application?

I think there must be three possibilities...

1. Capture the back button press (as below) and then call whatever method(s) the home button calls.

    @Override
    public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
        if ((keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_BACK)) {
            Log.d(this.getClass().getName(), "back button pressed");
        }
        return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
    }
   

2. Capture the back button press and then spoof a home button press.

3. Capture the back button press, then start an Activity of the home screen, effectively putting my application's Activity into the stopped state.

Edit: I know about services and am using one in the application to which this problem is related. This question is specifically about putting the Activity into the stopped state rather than the destroyed state on pressing the back button.

Most of the time you need to create a Service to perform something in the background, and your visible Activity simply controls this Service. (I'm sure the Music player works in the same way, so the example in the docs seems a bit misleading.) If that's the case, then your Activity can finish as usual and the Service will still be running.

A simpler approach is to capture the Back button press and call moveTaskToBack(true) as follows:

// 2.0 and above
@Override
public void onBackPressed() {
    moveTaskToBack(true);
}

// Before 2.0
@Override
public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
    if (keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_BACK) {
        moveTaskToBack(true);
        return true;
    }
    return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}

I think the preferred option should be for an Activity to finish normally and be able to recreate itself e.g. reading the current state from a Service if needed. But moveTaskToBack can be used as a quick alternative on occasion.

NOTE: as pointed out by Dave below Android 2.0 introduced a new onBackPressed method, and these recommendations on how to handle the Back button.

Use the following code:

public void onBackPressed() {    
    Intent intent = new Intent();
    intent.setAction(Intent.ACTION_MAIN);
    intent.addCategory(Intent.CATEGORY_HOME);
    startActivity(intent);
}

If you want to catch the Back Button have a look at this post on the Android Developer Blog. It covers the easier way to do this in Android 2.0 and the best way to do this for an application that runs on 1.x and 2.0.

However, if your Activity is Stopped it still may be killed depending on memory availability on the device. If you want a process to run with no UI you should create a Service. The documentation says the following about Services:

> A service doesn't have a visual user interface, but rather runs in the background for an indefinite period of time. For example, a service might play background music as the user attends to other matters, or it might fetch data over the network or calculate something and provide the result to activities that need it.

These seems appropriate for your requirements.

try to override void onBackPressed() defined in android.app.Activity class.

if it helps someone else, I had an activity with 2 layouts that I toggled on and off for visibilty, trying to emulate a kind of page1 > page2 structure. if they were on page 2 and pressed the back button I wanted them to go back to page 1, if they pressed the back button on page 1 it should still work as normal. Its pretty basic but it works

@Override
public void onBackPressed() {
// check if page 2 is open
	RelativeLayout page2layout = (RelativeLayout)findViewById(R.id.page2layout);
	if(page2layout.getVisibility() == View.VISIBLE){
		togglePageLayout(); // my method to toggle the views
		return;
	}else{
		super.onBackPressed(); // allows standard use of backbutton for page 1
	}

}

hope it helps someone, cheers

Working example..

Make sure don't call super.onBackPressed();

@Override
public void onBackPressed() {
   Log.d("CDA", "onBackPressed Called");
   Intent setIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_MAIN);
   setIntent.addCategory(Intent.CATEGORY_HOME);
   setIntent.setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK);
   startActivity(setIntent);
}

In this way your Back Button act like Home button . It doesn't finishes your activity but take it to background

Second way is to call moveTaskToBack(true); in onBackPressed and be sure to remove super.onBackPressed

Even better, how about OnPause():

Called as part of the activity lifecycle when an activity is going into the background, but has not (yet) been killed. The counterpart to onResume().

When activity B is launched in front of activity A, this callback will be invoked on A. B will not be created until A's onPause() returns, so be sure toenter code here not do anything lengthy here.

This callback is mostly used for saving any persistent state the activity is editing and making sure nothing is lost if there are not enough resources to start the new activity without first killing this one.

This is also a good place to do things like stop animations and other things that consume a noticeable amount of CPU in order to make the switch to the next activity as fast as possible, or to close resources that are exclusive access such as the camera.

Override onBackPressed() after android 2.0. Such as

@Override
public void onBackPressed() {
	moveTaskToBack(true);
}

I have use @Mirko N. answser using made the new Custom EditText

 public class EditViewCustom extends EditText {
 
	Button cancelBtn;
	RelativeLayout titleReleLayout;
	public EditViewCustom(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
		super(context, attrs, defStyle);
	}

	public EditViewCustom(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
		super(context, attrs);
	}

	public EditViewCustom(Context context) {
		super(context);
	}

	public void setViews(Button cancelBtn,RelativeLayout titleReleLayout){
		this.cancelBtn = cancelBtn;
		this.titleReleLayout = titleReleLayout;
	}
	
	@Override
	public boolean onKeyPreIme(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
		if (event.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_BACK) {
		    Log.d("KEYCODE_BACK","KEYCODE_BACK");
			cancelBtn.setVisibility(View.GONE);
			this.setFocusableInTouchMode(false);
			this.setFocusable(false);
			titleReleLayout.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
			
			return super.onKeyPreIme(keyCode, event);
		  }

		return super.onKeyPreIme(keyCode, event);
	}
 
}

Then set data from your activity

 searchEditView.setViews(cancelBtn, titleRelativeLayout);

Thank you.

I've tried all the above solutions, but none of them worked for me. The following code helped me, when trying to return to MainActivity in a way that onCreate gets called:

Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP is the key.

  @Override
  public void onBackPressed() {
      Intent intent = new Intent(this, MainActivity.class);
      intent.setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK | Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP);
      startActivity(intent);
  }