What determines the lifecycle of a component (object graph) in Dagger 2?

As for your question

What determines the lifecycle of a component (object graph) in Dagger 2?

The short answer is you determine it. Your components can be given a scope, such as

@Scope
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface ApplicationScope {
}

@Scope
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface ActivityScope {
}

These are useful for you for two things:

• Validation of scope: a component can only have unscoped providers, or scoped providers of the same scope as your component.

.

@Component(modules={ApplicationModule.class})
@ApplicationScope
public interface ApplicationComponent {
    Something something();
    AnotherThing anotherThing();

    void inject(Whatever whatever);
}

@Module
public class ApplicationModule {
    @ApplicationScope //application-scoped provider, only one can exist per component
    @Provides
    public Something something() {
         return new Something();
    }

    @Provides //unscoped, each INJECT call creates a new instance
    public AnotherThing anotherThing() {
        return new AnotherThing();
    }
}

• Allows for sub-scoping your scoped dependencies, thus allowing you to create a “subscoped” component that uses the provided instances from the “superscoped” component.

This can be done with @Subcomponent annotation, or component dependencies. I personally prefer dependencies.

@Component(modules={ApplicationModule.class})
@ApplicationScope
public interface ApplicationComponent {
    Something something();
    AnotherThing anotherThing();

    void inject(Whatever whatever);

    ActivityComponent newActivityComponent(ActivityModule activityModule); //subcomponent factory method
}

@Subcomponent(modules={ActivityModule.class})
@ActivityScope
public interface ActivityComponent {
    ThirdThingy thirdThingy();

    void inject(SomeActivity someActivity);
}

@Module
public class ActivityModule {
    private Activity activity;

    public ActivityModule(Activity activity) {
        this.activity = activity;
    }

    //...
}

ApplicationComponent applicationComponent = DaggerApplicationComponent.create();
ActivityComponent activityComponent = applicationComponent.newActivityComponent(new ActivityModule(SomeActivity.this));

Or you can use component dependencies like so

@Component(modules={ApplicationModule.class})
@ApplicationScope
public class ApplicationComponent {
    Something something(); 
    AnotherThing anotherThing();

    void inject(Whatever whatever);
}

@Component(dependencies={ApplicationComponent.class}, modules={ActivityModule.class})
@ActivityScope
public interface ActivityComponent extends ApplicationComponent {
    ThirdThingy thirdThingy();

    void inject(SomeActivity someActivity);
}

@Module
public class ActivityModule {
    private Activity activity;

    public ActivityModule(Activity activity) {
        this.activity = activity;
    }

    //...
}

ApplicationComponent applicationComponent = DaggerApplicationComponent.create();
ActivityComponent activityComponent = DaggerActivityComponent.builder().activityModule(new ActivityModule(SomeActivity.this)).build();

Important things to know:

• A scoped provider creates one instance for that given scope for each component. Meaning a component keeps track of its own instances, but other components don’t have a shared scope pool or some magic. To have one instance in a given scope, you need one instance of the component. This is why you must provide the ApplicationComponent to access its own scoped dependencies.

• A component can subscope only one scoped component. Multiple scoped component dependencies are not allowed.