Not quite. Imagine that you call from activity2, and Activity3 that is nothing but a form... you complete half the form, and in the way of doing it, you set a few variables... Now you hit the back Button, but you dont call activity.finish... You re-enter Activity3... althou the text fields may be empty, depending on your code, the previously set variables are unchanged (as opposed to being empty, null, or have a default value). This may cause your activity to produce results differently than if it had called activity.finish