Good practices for services on Android

Question

I am currently using 2 services in my app:

1: LocationService, basically trying to localize the user, and aims to stay alive only when the app is on for

Answer 1

It hasn't been well-documented in Google's official dev guide, Context.bindService() is actually an asynchronous call. This is the reason why ServiceConnection.onServiceConnected() is used as a callback method, means not happened immediately.

public class MyActivity extends Activity {
  private MyServiceBinder myServiceBinder;

  protected ServiceConnection myServiceConnection = new ServiceConnection() {
    public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName className, IBinder service) {
      myServiceBinder = (MyServiceBinderImpl) service;
    }

    ... ...
  }

  public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    // bindService() is an asynchronous call. myServiceBinder is resoloved in onServiceConnected()
    bindService(new Intent(this, MyService.class),myServiceConnection, Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE);
    // You will get a null point reference here, if you try to use MyServiceBinder immediately.
    MyServiceBinder.doSomething(); // <-- not yet resolved so Null point reference here
  }
}

A workaround is call MyServiceBinder.doSomething() in myServiceConnection.onServiceConnected(), or perform MyServiceBinder.doSomething() by some user interaction (e.g. button click), as the lag after you call bindService() and before system get a reference of myServiceBinder is quite soon. as long as you are not using it immediately, you should be just fine.

Check out this SO question CommonsWare's answer for more details.