Nah configuration changes are definitely a fault. Rotating your device or plugging in a keyboard should cause the UI to be torn down: it makes for a horrible U

Nah configuration changes are definitely a fault. Rotating your device or plugging in a keyboard should cause the UI to be torn down: it makes for a horrible UX and it's behavior that dates back to a phone that had 192MB of RAM. It should have been ditched ages ago but in typical Android fashion lived on so long that now it can't really be changed and instead the SDK tries to work around it by providing developers with primitives to work around it.