Is there any reason to continue using IntentService for handling GCM messages?

Question

As you know, recently Google changed their GCM documentation, and they claim that an IntentService is no longer required for handling arriving GCM messages. All

Answer 1

Why would most apps use an IntentService?

Because most likely whatever you are doing in response to the message will take more than 1-2ms, which means that you want to get that work off the main application thread. A common pattern for doing that in response to a broadcast is to delegate the work to an IntentService.

So, if your work in response to the GCM message involves:

• disk I/O
• further network I/O (e.g., retrieving additional data from your Web service)
• substantial calculations (e.g., image processing)

you will likely want to use an IntentService to perform that work.