Android app loses some state when unused for a while (maybe when removed from memory)

I frequently get interrupted when reading a story in the android app. If I switch back to the app quickly then things are normally fine. But if I take longer to return I often get the frame around the content of the story but just a loading indicator where the story normally is, and the story never loads. Further, if I try to open the original page in the browser I get the page for a different story. Even more strangely, when I press the back button I’m taken back to the list of feeds, not the list of stories in this feed. The story is marked as read so I wind up leaving lots of stories unfinished.

I was an engineer on the Android team way back before it launched, so I’ll venture a guess about what’s happening: when the phone is low on memory it evicts your process from memory. When I return to the app the activity is asked to restore from its saved state and it does this incorrectly.

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