Before I dive into the launch mode of an activity, we need to first understand the term, ‘Task’. A task is the stack (“Last in, First out”) which contains a collection of activity instances. Normally, when a user starts an app a new task will be created, and the first activity instance is called as a root of the task. The Android system can hold multiple tasks at the same time and only one task is in the foreground. Similar to a double click of the home key on iOS, if you long press the HOME key on Android you’ll be presented with a list of your currently running applications. You can select any one of these applications (which are currently running in the background) in order to bring it to the foreground and interact with the app.