This kills the app.

No seriously, keeping a reference to the activity as the context is a bad thing. Use getApplicationContext to make sure you dont get Activity leaks (not very friendly for you memory usage). Also, if you need to make the entire Context static, I'd say you need to rework the design, because it's simply something you dont want static. I'm all for making code more readable, but not by making the application suck up memory and unfriendly for testing.