Making the Action-bar Up-button behave smoothly like the Back-button

When hitting Android’s Back-button, current activity will be closed with bringing the previous one back to the top of the stack, but the keyword here is that happens without calling the previous one’s onCreate method.

Unlike when hitting the Up-button, current one will be closed, but the previous one’s onCreate will be called again causing a little delay (depends on what you do in your onCreate of course 🙂 )

So, here is the solution from this brilliant stackOverflow answer:

Intent intent = NavUtils.getParentActivityIntent(this); 
intent.setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP|Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP); 
NavUtils.navigateUpTo(this, intent);

& for a full solution you can put the previous code in onOptionsItemSelected like this:

public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
    switch (item.getItemId()) {
        // Respond to the action bar's Up/Home button
        case android.R.id.home:
            Intent intent = NavUtils.getParentActivityIntent(this);
            intent.setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP|Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP);
            NavUtils.navigateUpTo(this, intent);
            return true;
    }
    return super.onOptionsItemSelected(item);
}