I'm currently developing on minimum sdk version 3 (Android 1.5 - cupcake) and I'm having a strange unexplained issue that I have not been able to solve on my own. It is now becoming a rather urgent issue as I've already missed 1 deadline... I'm writing a high-level library to make long term android development easier and quicker. The one specific module has to capture images for a application... I've gotten everything right so far over the last couple months, except this one little thing and I don't know what to do any more: When I use the Camera object and implement a SurfaceHolder.Callback, the methods surfaceCreated() and surfaceChanged() are called one after the other. Then when the activity finishes, surfaceDestroyed() is called. This is how it should be, but when I stick the exact same code in my library (plain Java library that references the Android API - not in an activity), surfaceDestroyed() is called directly after created and changed. As a result - the camera object is closed before I can use it and the application force closes. What a pain. I can't do anything! This method call is controlled by the device.. Why does the surface close for no reason? Even when I post it to run on the activity thread through my own invokeAndWait(Runnable) method, like I do for many other things. I have 5 different working examples of different ways and implementations of capturing images in android but I still get the same issue when I plug it into my library. I don't understand what the difference is. The code is pretty much the same - and I post all the related code to the UI thread so its not a thread handling issue or anything like that. I've rewritten it about 20 times in different ways - same issue every time.. The only other way to approach it that I know of is creating a new Camera and setting it to the VideoView. The android source (c++ native code) however provides no Camera constructor, only an open() method which automatically forwards the camera's state to 'prepared' but I can only set the camera to the VideoView from the 'initialized' state. Pretty silly, I know, but there is no way around it unless I modify the Android library source code haha. not an option! The API does not allow for this method - you are expected to use it like my first example. So essentially - i just need to understand exactly why surfaceDestroyed() is called out of turn and if there is anything I can do to avoid it closing? If i can just understand the exact logic behind it and how it works! The documentation isn't much help! Secondly, if someone knows of any alternative ways to do it, as my second example, but hopefully one which the API actually allows for? haha Thanks guys. I would post code, but its fairly complicated, a couple thousand lines for this specific class and it would probably take a couple days to explain with all the threading and event listeners and what not. I just need help with this 1 single thing. Please let me know if you have any questions.