Android Context 101 with Class Diagram

Beginner’s Guide to understand the fundamental of Context with class diagram in Android app development

Vincent Tsen
4 min readApr 29, 2023

You may find Context in Android app development is confusing. For example, which one you should use?

Before answering that, let’s look at the Context class diagram below to understand its relationship with other classes/components.

Context Class Diagram

From the class diagram above, you can tell Activity, Service and Application inherits/extends Context indirectly.

As you can see, there are ContextThemeWrapper that extends ContextWrapper that extends Context. Here are the brief descriptions of all 3 classes.

  • Context is an abstract class that allows an Android application to access system resources and interact with the operating system
  • ContextWrapper is a convenient way to modify the behavior of a Context object, such as adding additional functionality or overriding existing behavior, without changing the original Context itself.
  • ContextThemeWrapper

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