should I use setDaemon() in android?

Question

I'm creating a service Thread for my application, this thread will perform background tasks, and therefore it'll be usage only if my Main thread is running.

So should I declare it as a Daemon ?

Answer 1

On Android, it's better to make sure you manage your threads explicitly. Tell them when to terminate.

See a related discussion here. They didn't find a solution, and observed long-living threads instead:

What hooks do we have in order to do worker thread termination on application exit

Note that standard Java shutdown hooks are not guaranteed on this platform:

http://developer.android.com/reference/java/lang/Runtime.html#addShutdownHook%28java.lang.Thread%29

So, instead of relying on an (undocumented?) belief that Android will properly kill your VM anyway and guessing on daemon/not daemon, it seems to be better to control the threads.

Answer 2

Not really. Android doesn't have a main() methods for apps and they don't exit, but are managed by the system. If it decides to kill your app to free resources, it (most probably) won't care if you have daemon threads or not.