Local service or remote service?

Question

I have a background Service which must run permanently. The service just has to interact with my Activity.

1. How to i check on activity resume if the service is

Answer 1

I have a background service which must run permanently.

This is not possible. The user or Android will kill off your service at some point. Please reconsider your architecture.

How to i check on activity resume if the service is still running?

Generally, you don't.

Is there a better possibility than a static variable in the service class?

That will not work if the user or Android kills off your service.

Is it of advantage to use a remote service in a separate process(to extend service life time) so that when the activity process gets killed the service is still alive?

A remote service has nothing to do with whether the service runs after activities are destroyed. If you call startService(), the service will run, independent of any activities, until:

• you call stopService() from an activity
• the service calls stopSelf()
• Android terminates the service
• the user terminates the service via the Settings application
• the user terminates the service via a "task killer" (Android 2.1 and earlier, at least)