Is it possible to run my service for indefinite time?

Question

Can I run a background service Indefinitely ? Will android kill my service if i run it for indefinitely ? How Facebook android application keep running in background for a long time ?? please help me to know about it .

Answer 1

You can use for that these features:

1) Auto-restart service after reboot (Start intent after Reboot)

2) Sticky service mode (http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service.html#START_STICKY)

These features both helps to leave your service started all time as possible.

Answer 2

Android will kill your service if it's running out of memory, but you can do a couple of things to recover from it.

The first thing you can try is to use foreground services, a foreground service is a high priority services that won't be killed unless is completely necessary (note that these services increase battery consumption). You can find an example here using compatibility with older devices, otherwise you only need to call startForeground inside your service.

Another thing you can do is to use some flags in your service to restart it when it gets killed by the OS. You can use 2 different flags (depending on which behaviour you want to reproduce).

• START_STICKY will restart your service with an empty intent so everytime you have to recover the data you need to run your service.

• START_REDELIVER_INTENT in this case your service will be restarted with the last intent information (it could be that you run your service several times with different information when you want different behaviour).

The flags can be used as follows:

@Override
public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) {
//Do your service work
return START_STICKY; //or return START_REDELIVER_INTENT;
}

Depending on what you need use one or another.

Hope it helps :)