Android keeping a background service alive preventing process death

Question

I have a service that is defined as   public class SleepAccelerometerService extends Service implements SensorEventListener   Essentially  I am making an app that monitors accelerometer activity for various reasons while the user sleeps with his or her phone device on the bed  This is a long-running service that MUST NOT be killed during the night  Depending on how many background apps and periodic processes occur during the night  android sometimes kills off my process  thereby ending my service  Example   10-04 03 27 41 673  INFO ActivityManager 1269   Process com androsz electricsleep  pid 16223  has died  10-04 03 27 41 681  INFO WindowManager 1269   WIN DEATH  Window 45509f98 com androsz electricsleep com androsz electricsleep ui SleepActivity paused false    I do not want to force the user to have  SleepActivity  or some other activity in my app as the foreground  I can t have my service run periodically  because it is constantly intercepting onSensorChanged   Any tips  source code is here  http   code google com p electricsleep

User · Answer

Keep your service footprint small  this reduces the probability of Android closing your application  You can t prevent it from being killed because if you could then people could easily create persistent spyware

User · Answer

http   developer android com reference android content Context html BIND ABOVE CLIENT  public static final int BIND ABOVE CLIENT -- Added in API level 14  Flag for bindService Intent  ServiceConnection  int   indicates that the client application binding to this service considers the service to be more important than the app itself  When set  the platform will try to have the out of memory killer kill the app before it kills the service it is bound to  though this is not guaranteed to be the case   Other flags of the same group are  BIND ADJUST WITH ACTIVITY  BIND AUTO CREATE  BIND IMPORTANT  BIND NOT FOREGROUND  BIND WAIVE PRIORITY   Note that the meaning of BIND AUTO CREATE has changed in ICS  and old applications that don t specify BIND AUTO CREATE will automatically have the flags BIND WAIVE PRIORITY and BIND ADJUST WITH ACTIVITY set for them

User · Answer

I had a similar issue  On some devices after a while Android kills my service and even startForeground   does not help  And my customer does not like this issue  My solution is to use AlarmManager class to make sure that the service is running when it s necessary  I use AlarmManager to create a kind of watchdog timer  It checks from time to time if the service should be running and restart it  Also I use SharedPreferences to keep the flag  whether the service should be running   Creating dismissing my watchdog timer   void setServiceWatchdogTimer boolean set  int timeout        Intent intent      PendingIntent alarmIntent      intent   new Intent       forms and creates appropriate Intent and pass it to AlarmManager     intent setAction ACTION WATCHDOG OF SERVICE       intent setClass this  WatchDogServiceReceiver class       alarmIntent   PendingIntent getBroadcast this  0  intent  PendingIntent FLAG UPDATE CURRENT       AlarmManager am  AlarmManager getSystemService Context ALARM SERVICE       if set          am set AlarmManager RTC WAKEUP  System currentTimeMillis     timeout  alarmIntent       else         am cancel alarmIntent       Receiving and processing the intent from the watchdog timer       this class processes the intent and     checks whether the service should be running     public static class WatchDogServiceReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver        Override     public void onReceive Context context  Intent intent                 if intent getAction   equals ACTION WATCHDOG OF SERVICE                            check your flag and                 restart your service if it s necessary             setServiceWatchdogTimer true  60000 5      restart the watchdogtimer                     Indeed I use WakefulBroadcastReceiver  instead of BroadcastReceiver  I gave you the code with BroadcastReceiver just to simplify it

User · Answer

For Android 2 0 or later you can use the startForeground   method to start your Service in the foreground     The documentation says the following      A started service can use the startForeground int  Notification  API to put the service in a foreground state  where the system considers it to be something the user is actively aware of and thus not a candidate for killing when low on memory   It is still theoretically possible for the service to be killed under extreme memory pressure from the current foreground application  but in practice this should not be a concern     The is primarily intended for when killing the service would be disruptive to the user  e g  killing a music player service would stop music playing   You ll need to supply a Notification to the method which is displayed in the Notifications Bar in the Ongoing section

User · Answer

When you bind your Service to Activity with BIND AUTO CREATE your service is being killed just after your Activity is Destroyed and unbound  It does not depend on how you ve implemented your Services unBind method it will be still killed    The other way is to start your Service with startService method from your Activity  This way even if your Activity is destroyed your service won t be destroyed or even paused but you have to pause destroy it by yourself with stopSelf stopService when appropriate

User · Answer

As Dave already pointed out  you could run your Service with foreground priority  But this practice should only be used when it s absolutely necessary  i e  when it would cause a bad user experience if the Service got killed by Android  This is what the  foreground  really means  Your app is somehow in the foreground and the user would notice it immediately if it s killed  e g  because it played a song or a video    In most cases  requesting foreground priority for your Service is contraproductive   Why is that  When Android decides to kill a Service  it does so because it s short of resources  usually RAM   Based on the different priority classes  Android decides which running processes  and this included services  to terminate in order to free resources  This is a healthy process that you want to happen so that the user has a smooth experience  If you request foreground priority  without a good reason  just to keep your service from being killed  it will most likely cause a bad user experience  Or can you guarantee that your service stays within a minimal resource consumption and has no memory leaks 1  Android provides sticky services to mark services that should be restarted after some grace period if they got killed  This restart usually happens within a few seconds   Image you want to write an XMPP client for Android  Should you request foreground priority for the Service which contains your XMPP connection  Definitely no  there is absolutely no reason to do so  But you want to use START STICKY as return flag for your service s onStartCommand method  So that your service is stopped when there is resource pressure and restarted once the situation is back to normal   1  I am pretty sure that many Android apps have memory leaks  It something the casual  desktop  programmer doesn t care that much about

User · Answer

I m working on an app and face issue of killing  my service by on app kill  I researched on google and found that I have to make it foreground  following is the code   public class UpdateLocationAndPrayerTimes extends Service     Context context   Override public void onCreate         super onCreate        context   this      Override public int onStartCommand Intent intent  int flags  int startId         StartForground        return START STICKY      Override public void onDestroy           super onDestroy        Nullable  Override public IBinder onBind Intent intent        return null      private void StartForground         LocationChangeDetector locationChangeDetector   new LocationChangeDetector context       locationChangeDetector getLatAndLong        Notification notification   new NotificationCompat Builder this               setOngoing false               setSmallIcon android R color transparent                  setSmallIcon R drawable picture               build        startForeground 101   notification              hops that it may helps

[android] Android: keeping a background service alive (preventing process death)

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