Views saving instance state in Android
The activity lifecycle is central to Android development. Although it is quite well defined, it does take a bit of getting used to. One aspect new developers perhaps struggle with is that rotating the device will by default destroy and recreate the activity.
A well behaved activity will restore its state after a rotation so the user can continue using the application with no lose of state. e.g. EditText widgets should restore the text they contained when the device was rotated and a long running operation should resume without restarting.
There are a few topics to understand to achieve this effectively but one that I’d like to talk about is views saving and restoring their instance state. In most cases saving state is actually very simple but when creating compound views a couple extra steps are required. Compound views combine multiple views into a single convenient reusable view, e.g. the NumberPicker. Read more 