Summary:
Creating a persistent reference to an Activity leads to a nasty form of memory leaks (see http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/01/avoiding-memory-leaks.html, https://corner.squareup.com/2015/05/leak-canary.html). There are many ways to create a bad persistent reference to an Activity, but the most obvious one is via a static field.
This diff implements a very simple form of Activity leak checking by inspecting postconditions to see if a subtype of Activity is reachable from a static field (and it reports an error if so). This is a very simple and limited form of leak checking that does not understand the Android lifecycle at all. In particular, if one creates a persistent reference to an Activity and then nulls it out in `onDestroy` (a reasonably common pattern), this approach will wrongly report a bug.
Sam Blackshear