Menu System is an important part of a game, no matter which platform you want to target. Same is the case with Android and I found the platform flexible enough to facilitate any such requirement. While developing my first game, i too got into multiple approaches while i was searching for the best (and of-course ‘easier’ 
) way to develop a menu system for my game. I found some ways on different forums that involve making an activity for each menu screen. This has some advantages but I personally didn’t like this approach. Finally I found a way, through some experimentation, that was more understandable (for an indie PC game developer, like me) and is described below:
1. Create a layout file (.xml) for your menu screen just like you do to create any other screen and place some controls on it. You can add as many screens as you want using this way.
2. Now you have to modify your game activity class to initialize these layouts using View objects. You can either keep separate variables for each view or you can declare and array of views and initialize them all.
3. The currentView variable is an index that determines the view that should be passed on to the activity to show on the screen.
4. Now initialize your view depending on its type. You must use the LayoutInflator class to get the view object that you want to store.
This is a simple utility function that takes a layout resource id and returns the required view object.
5. Write event handlers for your controls in each layout in your activity class and use the currentView variable to determine the next view to show.
6. Now you can use the setContentView(View) function in your event handlers to switch to the next screen by using currentView index and using it in allViews array. Look at the sample call below:
7. Optionally, you can pass parameters among these views by utilizing the view.setTag(object) function and passing it a custom parameter class instance.
This way, you can think of your whole game as a single activity (just like a PC game) and switching between screens as required. I don’t assume that this approach is the best one out there and i look forward for some positive feedback on this.
I can only say that i personally like the idea of having views rather than activities much more.
i find activities rather complicated and the apps lifecycle perhaps being over-engineered. just switching views seems is simple and can be animated, too.
I got the idea initially from another person. look here:
http://twigstechtips.blogspot.com/
Also, sad to see noone else answered here in the meantime as i like to hear other opinions, too
yeah! Perhaps not much people visit this blog as yet
Well activities help in sustaining states if needed. But i figured out that most of the people use activities to make different screens like menus.
Thanks for visiting and commenting BTW
Hey guys, thanks for linking to my blog.
As for storing all the views in a variable, you’ll find it troublesome when it comes to memory management and screen rotations because the views are destroyed and recreated.
The reviews on the Android market are merciless and users won’t understand “it crashes when you rotate”, they’ll just give you a 1 star rating and say “FC when I tried it, app sucks”.
If you want to do it that way, remember to:
1) Set the views to “null” when they are no longer needed
2) Lock the screen orientation or be prepared to test thoroughly!
3) Tests should be repeated multiple times to find those tricky bugs. It might not happen after 1 screen rotation, but after 3-4 times.