To my fuzzy little brain, the core of a ‘view’ object, be it an NSView, a JComponent, or a HWND object is simple: it’s a rectangular piece of screen real estate. It can draw into its piece of screen real estate. It gets called when it needs to be redrawn and when it is optionally clicked on. It gets called when its location inside the superview is changed. And it can have the ‘keyboard focus’ (whatever the hell you want to call that), so that keystrokes and menu commands are routed to it. And ideally it is embedded in a hierarchy of other views, and has a well designed event subsystem which allows unhandled events to be forwarded to the appropriate parent view or to other event handler abstractions in the system.

So to my fuzzy little brain, the Google Android OS should, when the aspect ratio of the screen is changed by opening the keyboard, send some sort of ‘size changed’ message. And perhaps as part of the message I can either just resize my children or, in a dramatic (but unlikely) case tear down and rebuild my contents–such as having a list view turn into a map view.

So when I read the following here:

Unless you specify otherwise, a configuration change (such as a change in screen orientation, language, input devices, etc) will cause your current activity to be destroyed, going through the normal activity lifecycle process of onPause(), onStop(), and onDestroy() as appropriate. If the activity had been in the foreground or visible to the user, once onDestroy() is called in that instance then a new instance of the activity will be created, with whatever savedInstanceState the previous instance had generated from onSaveInstanceState(Bundle).

This is done because any application resource, including layout files, can change based on any configuration value. Thus the only safe way to handle a configuration change is to re-retrieve all resources, including layouts, drawables, and strings. Because activities must already know how to save their state and re-create themselves from that state, this is a convenient way to have an activity restart itself with a new configuration.

(Emphasis mine.)

WT(bloody)F?!?