Most of the time, I came across a situation, to choose whether I should present this list of data to user as Activity, or Dialog. I was wondering, is there any basic UI design guideline I should follow? I search through web, I do not see much discussion on this.
If the data presentation is just natural/straight path of work-flow, it should be presented in activity. While if your UI is to ask for conformation, warn / inform user about something specific or unusual (data loss warning / confirm for delete file etc) then dialogs can be used.
Also keep in mind that Activity also has back-stack, so by pressing back, user can come back to previous activity. While dialogs are not meant to be come back by pressing back.