Singletons vs. Application Context in Android?

Application is not the same as the Singleton.The reasons are:

1. Application's method(such as onCreate) is called in the ui thread;
2. singleton's method can be called in any thread;
3. In the method "onCreate" of Application,you can instantiate Handler;
4. If the singleton is executed in none-ui thread,you could not instantiate Handler;
5. Application has the ability to manage the life cycle of the activities in the app.It has the method "registerActivityLifecycleCallbacks".But the singletons has not the ability.

From: Developer > reference - Application

There is normally no need to subclass Application. In most situation, static singletons can provide the same functionality in a more modular way. If your singleton needs a global context (for example to register broadcast receivers), the function to retrieve it can be given a Context which internally uses Context.getApplicationContext() when first constructing the singleton.

I very much recommend singletons. If you have a singleton that needs a context, have:

MySingleton.getInstance(Context c) {
    //
    // ... needing to create ...
    sInstance = new MySingleton(c.getApplicationContext());
}

I prefer singletons over Application because it helps keep an app much more organized and modular -- instead of having one place where all of your global state across the app needs to be maintained, each separate piece can take care of itself. Also the fact that singletons lazily initialize (at request) instead of leading you down the path of doing all initialization up-front in Application.onCreate() is good.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with using singletons. Just use them correctly, when it makes sense. The Android framework actually has a lot of them, for it to maintain per-process caches of loaded resources and other such things.

Also for simple applications multithreading doesn't become an issue with singletons, because by design all standard callbacks to the app are dispatched on the main thread of the process so you won't have multi-threading happening unless you introduce it explicitly through threads or implicitly by publishing a content provider or service IBinder to other processes.

Just be thoughtful about what you are doing. :)

I very much disagree with Dianne Hackborn's response. We are bit by bit removing all singletons from our project in favor of lightweight, task scoped objects which can easiliy be re-created when you actually need them.

Singletons are a nightmare for testing and, if lazily initialized, will introduce "state indeterminism" with subtle side effects (which may suddenly surface when moving calls to getInstance() from one scope to another). Visibility has been mentioned as another problem, and since singletons imply "global" (= random) access to shared state, subtle bugs may arise when not properly synchronized in concurrent applications.

I consider it an anti-pattern, it's a bad object-oriented style that essentially amounts to maintaining global state.

To come back to your question:

Although the app context can be considered a singleton itself, it is framework-managed and has a well defined life-cycle, scope, and access path. Hence I believe that if you do need to manage app-global state, it should go here, nowhere else. For anything else, rethink if you really need a singleton object, or if it would also be possible to rewrite your singleton class to instead instantiate small, short-lived objects that perform the task at hand.