onDestroy() won't get called after this.finish()

Question

I'm wondering why the Motorola Milestone with 2.1-update1 behaves differently from the Emulator or e.g. the Nexus One. I am trying to exit my app with:

@Override
protected void onPause() {
    if(mayDestroyActivity) this.finish();
    super.onPause();
}

This works well on either Emulator or Nexus One. onDestroy() gets called immediatly after onPause() and onStop. But not for the Milestone. Instead, onDestroy() gets called when another Activity is started. Its section in the Manifest looks like this:

<activity android:name=".MyActivity"  
    android:configChanges="orientation|keyboardHidden"  
 android:label="@string/questionnaire_item"
 android:launchMode="singleInstance"
    android:theme="@android:style/Theme.NoTitleBar.Fullscreen"
 android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustPan">
 <intent-filter>
  <category android:name="android.intent.category.OPENABLE" />
 </intent-filter>
</activity>

Does anyone have a hint on this? My app depends on exiting properly since I save all progress in onDestroy()

Thanks,
Steff

Answer 1

You are doing it wrong. This is what the Doc says:

Note: do not count on this method being called as a place for saving data! [...] There are situations where the system will simply kill the activity's hosting process without calling this method (or any others) in it, so it should not be used to do things that are intended to remain around after the process goes away.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#onDestroy%28%29