Stopping and starting a Service based on application state

Question

I have a Service which tracks the location of the user. Currently, the Service boots when the application starts and stops when the application terminates. Unfortunately,

Answer 1

I haven't tested this yet, but it looks like if you use Context#bindService() (instead of Context#startService()), the service should stop when no more activities are bound to it. (see Service lifecycle).

Then use onPause()/onResume() in each activity to bind/unbind from the service.

Alternatively, you could add a pair of methods on your service which tell it to start/stop listening for location updates and call it from each activity's onResume()/onPause(). The service would still be running, but the location updates wouldn't be draining the battery.