Android long-duration socket listener

Question

My company has, in essence, undertaken a project to replace some of its pagers with stock smartphones running Android. As long as they are signed in, the device should be liste

Answer 1

The OS won't kill your process if you are using Service.startForground(). This is what things like music playback use, and you wouldn't want those to be killed after some amount of time.

That said, for this kind of thing you generally wouldn't need to make your service foreground -- when the system does kill your process because it has been sitting around or needs the memory, it still knows the service wants to remaining running so will restart the service shortly after that. This is how Google's own services work, they have one .apk that has a background service running that keeps a network connection open to a Google service which reports back when interesting things should be done like sync new e-mail, retrieve and deliver a C2DM Intent, etc.

Also you should not hold a wake lock during all of that time. You will kill the battery, especially on some devices like those with Samsung's Hummingbird processor. The right way to do this is to just leave the socket open and let the device fall asleep. If data is delivered to the socket, the CPU will wake up to deliver that data and at that point you should acquire a partial wake lock just for the time you need to read and process the data.

Answer 2

What you describe sounds like a job for Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework.

It's currently not completely open but there is a signup link on that page. I signed up and was accepted within 20 minutes of my application. Worth a look IMO.