Binding and starting a service when application starts

Question

I have a service in Android that encapsulates a framework that has a start method. The service boils down to something like this, many things omitted:

public class MyService extends Service {

    private IBinder thisBinder;

    public MyService(){
        thisBinder = new LocalBinder();
    }

    @Override
    public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) {
        return thisBinder;
    }

    public void start(Map<String, Object> options)
    {
        getDriverManager().start(options);
    }
}

I also have a bridging class that makes calls to the service:

public class MyServiceBridge implements ServiceConnection {

    private boolean started = false;
    private boolean bound = false;
    private MyService myService;

    public MyServiceBridge(Context context){
        this.context = context;
    }

    public void bindService(){
        Intent intent = new Intent(getContext(), MyService.class);

        getContext().bindService(intent, this, getContext().BIND_AUTO_CREATE);
        getContext().startService(intent);
    }

    // Here's a sample call, and the one that is relevant
    public void start(Map<String, Object> options){
        setOptions(options);
        if(bound == true){
            getMyService().start(options);
        }
        else{
            started = true;
        }
    }
}

I call the bridge's start method in order to run the service. This works fine, except in this particular situation (so far). The MyApplication class calls the bridge's start method on onCreate:

public class MyApplication extends Application {

    @Override
    public void onCreate() {

        super.onCreate();

        getServiceBridge().start(null);
    }
}

This, according to the docs is "Called when the application is starting, before any activity, service, or receiver objects (excluding content providers) have been created.". Indeed it appears to be so, because the service does not start, and instead starts when I close the app (odd, at least). This works if I move the call to an activity's onCreate method, but that's not ideal because I can also stop the service, and I want the service to run for the lifetime of the app. That is, the service should start when the app starts and stop when the app terminates. Does this make sense? Is there another way to do this?

Answer 1

In my opinion, you did a good job when you decided to run service in Application onCreate. but it is strange to hear that service is started when you close the app. I have done this several times, and service starts in application onCreate which must be called.

Have you checked if your application is alive and run in background? Please make sure that you killed you application before testing. Use Task Killer or something like that, to be sure that application is always freshly started.

Sadly, Android does not have appropriate mechanism to notify you when application is exited, because it is still alive until system decides to kill it and free resources.