Can bindService() be made to block?

Question

I have an Android application that uses a Remote Service and I bind to it with bindService(), which is asynchronous.

The app is useless until the service is

Answer 1

When I need to wait a service to be bound before doing something else I play with locks. Precisely, the ServiceConnection owns a lock object and exposes a waitUntilConnected method that block on the lock until a wake up signal. That notification is located in the onServiceConnected callback.

public class MyServiceConnection implements ServiceConnection {

    private volatile boolean connected = false;
    private Object lock = new Object();

    @Override
    public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName name, IBinder binder) {
        connected = true;

        synchronized (lock) {
            lock.notifyAll();
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName name) {
        connected = false;
    }

    public void waitUntilConnected() throws InterruptedException {
        if (!connected) {
            synchronized (lock) {
                lock.wait();
            }
        }
    }

}

So, for example, if an activity has to wait a service to be bound, it calls simply the waitUntilConnected method.

protected void onStart() {
    super.onStart();

    bindService(myServiceIntent, myServiceConnection, Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE);
    try {
        myServiceConnection.waitUntilConnected();
    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}

I placed the waitUntilConnected method in onStart just as an example, but it has to be called in a different thread. I'd like to hear a more elegant way! :)