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When certain kinds of errors are detected, such as irrecoverable logic errors, rather than risk data corruption by continuing to execute in an indeterminate state, the appropriate strategy may be for the system to quickly shut down, allowing the operator to start it afresh in a determinate state.
Section 6.46, "Termination Strategy [REU]," [ISO/IEC TR 24772:2010] says:

When a fault is detected, there are many ways in which a system can react. The quickest and most noticeable way is to fail hard, also known as fail fast or fail stop. The reaction to a detected fault is to immediately halt the system. Alternatively, the reaction to a detected fault could be to fail soft. The system would keep working with the faults present, but the performance of the system would be degraded. Systems used in a high availability environment such as telephone switching centers, e-commerce, or other "always available" applications would likely use a fail soft approach. What is actually done in a fail soft approach can vary depending on whether the system is used for safety critical or security critical purposes. For fail-safe systems, such as flight controllers, traffic signals, or medical monitoring systems, there would be no effort to meet normal operational requirements, but rather to limit the damage or danger caused by the fault. A system that fails securely, such as cryptologic systems, would maintain maximum security when a fault is detected, possibly through a denial of service.

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Runtime.exit() is the typical way of exiting a program. According to the Java API [API 06] Runtime.exit():

terminates the currently running Java virtual machine by initiating its shutdown sequence. This method never returns normally. The argument serves as a status code; by convention, a nonzero status code indicates abnormal termination.

The virtual machine's shutdown sequence consists of two phases. In the first phase all registered shutdown hooks, if any, are started in some unspecified order and allowed to run concurrently until they finish. In the second phase all uninvoked finalizers are run if finalization-on-exit has been enabled. Once this is performed the virtual machine halts.

If this method is invoked after the virtual machine has begun its shutdown sequence, then if shutdown hooks are being run, this method will block indefinitely. If shutdown hooks have already been run and on-exit finalization has been enabled, then this method halts the virtual machine with the given status code if the status is nonzero; otherwise, it blocks indefinitely.

The System.exit() method is the conventional and convenient means of invoking this method.

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Runtime.halt() is similar to Runtime.exit() but does not run shutdown hooks or finalizers. According to the Java API [API 06], Runtime.halt()

forcibly terminates the currently running Java virtual machine. This method never returns normally.
This method should be used with extreme caution. Unlike the exit method, this method does not cause shutdown hooks to be started and does not run uninvoked finalizers if finalization-on-exit has been enabled. If the shutdown sequence has already been initiated, then this method does not wait for any running shutdown hooks or finalizers to finish their work.

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According to the Java API [API 2006], Class Runtime, method addShutdownHook(),

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To avoid race conditions or deadlock between shutdown actions, it may be better to run a series of shutdown tasks from one thread by using a single shutdown hook [Goetz 2006].

This compliant solution shows the standard method to install a hook.

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Related Guidelines

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Although most of the code examples are not applicable to the Android platform, the principle is applicable to Android. There are a number of ways to terminate a process on Android: android.app.Activity.finish(), and the related finish... methods, android.app.Activity.moveTaskToBack(boolean flag), android.os.Process.killProcess(int pid), System.exit().

Bibliography

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