Is it possible to preserve the state of a ViewModel after the application process ends?

The standard ViewModel in Android is designed to store and manage UI data throughout the lifecycle of an Activity or Fragment, but it does not preserve state after the application process is terminated (for example, when the system kills the process to free memory).

To preserve the ViewModel state after process termination, additional state-saving mechanisms should be used, such as:

• SavedStateHandle — allows saving and restoring data when the component is recreated, but not when the process is completely terminated.
• Saving data to persistent storage: SharedPreferences, database (Room), files.

Thus, if you need to preserve the ViewModel state after process termination, you should explicitly save the necessary data to persistent storage and restore it from there when creating the ViewModel.

Example of using SavedStateHandle in ViewModel:

class MyViewModel(private val state: SavedStateHandle) : ViewModel() {
    var counter: Int
        get() = state.get<Int>("counter") ?: 0
        set(value) = state.set("counter", value)
}

But I repeat, SavedStateHandle does not save data upon full process termination; for that, persistent storage should be used.