Why extend the Android Application class?

Introduction:

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  1. If we consider an apk file in our mobile, it is comprised of
    multiple useful blocks such as, Activitys, Services and
    others.
  2. These components do not communicate with each other regularly and
    not forget they have their own life cycle. which indicate that
    they may be active at one time and inactive the other moment.

Requirements:

  1. Sometimes we may require a scenario where we need to access a
    variable and its states across the entire Application regardless of
    the Activity the user is using,
  2. An example is that a user might need to access a variable that holds his
    personnel information (e.g. name) that has to be accessed across the
    Application,
  3. We can use SQLite but creating a Cursor and closing it again and
    again is not good on performance,
  4. We could use Intents to pass the data but it’s clumsy and activity
    itself may not exist at a certain scenario depending on the memory-availability.

Uses of Application Class:

  1. Access to variables across the Application,
  2. You can use the Application to start certain things like analytics
    etc. since the application class is started before Activitys or
    Servicess are being run,
  3. There is an overridden method called onConfigurationChanged() that is
    triggered when the application configuration is changed (horizontal
    to vertical & vice-versa),
  4. There is also an event called onLowMemory() that is triggered when
    the Android device is low on memory.

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