Android: How to prevent service from restarting after crashing?

Question

Is there a way to prevent my Service from automatically being restarted by ActivityManager after it "crashes"? In some scenarios, I forcefully kill my service on program exit, but do not want Android to keep restarting it.

Answer 1

This behavior is defined by the return value of onStartCommand() in your Service implementation. The constant START_NOT_STICKY tells Android not to restart the service if it s running while the process is "killed". In other words:

@Override
public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) {
    // We don't want this service to continue running if it is explicitly
    // stopped, so return not sticky.
    return START_NOT_STICKY;
}

HTH