According to the document by android here, an activity has essentially four states, and one of them is called paused and it is the state of an activity which has lost focus but is still visible. My question is this: Is this state limited only to that situation or we can generalize it to this new definition: An activity state is paused right after onStart() or onPaused() returns.
Is this state limited only to that situation or we can generalize it to this new definition: An activity state is paused right after onStart() or onPaused() returns.
No. Its not limited to that situation.
If you read further it says:
The foreground lifetime of an activity happens between a call to onResume() until a corresponding call to onPause(). During this time the activity is in front of all other activities and interacting with the user. An activity can frequently go between the resumed and paused states -- for example when the device goes to sleep, when an activity result is delivered, when a new intent is delivered -- so the code in these methods should be fairly lightweight.