The Application base class offers the following features:

• Lifecycle methods OnStart, OnSleep, and OnResume.
• Modal navigation events ModalPushing, ModalPushed, ModalPopping, and ModalPopped.

Lifecycle Methods

The Application class contains three virtual methods that can be overridden to handle lifecycle methods:

• OnStart - Called when the application starts.

• OnSleep - Called each time the application goes to the background.

• OnResume - Called when the application is resumed, after being sent to the background.

Note that there is no method for application termination. Under normal circumstances (ie. not a crash) application termination will happen fom the OnSleep state, without any additional notifications to your code.

To observe when these methods are called, implement a WriteLine call in each (as shown below) and test on each platform.

protected override void OnStart()
{
    Debug.WriteLine ("OnStart");
}
protected override void OnSleep()
{
    Debug.WriteLine ("OnSleep");
}
protected override void OnResume()
{
    Debug.WriteLine ("OnResume");
}

When updating older Xamarin.Forms applications (eg. create with Xamarin.Forms 1.3 or older), ensure that the Android main activity includes ConfigurationChanges = ConfigChanges.ScreenSize | ConfigChanges.Orientation in the [Activity()] attribute. If this is not present you will observe the OnStart method gets called on rotation as well as when the application first starts. This attribute is automatically included in the current Xamarin.Forms app templates.

Modal Navigation Events

There are four new events on the Application class in Xamarin.Forms 1.4, each with their own event arguments:

• ModalPushing - ModalPushingEventArgs
• ModalPushed - ModalPushedEventArgs
• ModalPopping - the ModalPoppingEventArgs class contains a Cancel property. When Cancel is set to true the modal pop is cancelled.
• ModalPopped - ModalPoppedEventArgs

These events will help you better manage your application lifecycle, by letting you respond to modal pages being shown and dismissed.