What does "semi-public service" mean in Android?

Question

I searching a way how to disable the opening and closing animation of notification bar (status bar). The behavior and animation is hardcoded in StatusBarService. The documentation says that the StatusBarService is "semi-public". What does "semi-public service" mean?

Answer 1

Semi-public, meaning that the public only has access to parts of the service. There will be certain functionality that you cannot modify, and some you can. Another example of semi-public functionality is found around KeyCode, in which the KEYCODE_HOME is never sent to applications in order to protect users against malicious applications.