Android: Is it safe to create a static method to return the application instance?

Question

It annoys me when I need to pass the context reference around all over my code. So I am thinking to create a static method to return a reference to the application instance. I am not sure if it is safe to assume there is only one instance of the Application in one application. Apparently, the Application class in Android SDK doesn't provide such method to return the instance reference. So I suspect there must be a reason?

Answer 1

It's probably safe, assuming that your android app lives within a single os process (most do, but this isn't a guarantee on android), but I advise against it.

If you need access to the context/application outside of the places where it's already available (activities, services, broadcast receivers, applications, views, etc), you're probably letting details related to the android environment creep into code that shouldn't know so much about it.

The big exception is static utility methods (e.g. to display a canned dialog that you reuse in your app or similar), in which case passing your context is kind of a convention in the android world (for example, ProgressDialog.show takes a Context as its first argument).

While you can do this, my feeling is that it's probably a band-aid to work around the fact that you have too many components in your code that are unnecessarily tightly coupled to the android environment.