Start a service in android

Anonymous User 2227 05 Aug 2015

Suppose that you are starting a service in an Activity as follows:

Intent service = new Intent(context, MyService.class);             
startService(service);

where MyService accesses a remote server via an Internet connection.

If the Activity is showing an animation that indicates some kind of progress, what issue might you encounter and how could you address it?

1 Answers

Anonymous User 06 Aug 2015

Responses from a remote service via the Internet can often take some time, either due to networking latencies, or load on the remote server, or the amount of time it takes for the remote service to process and respond to the request.

As a result, if such a delay occurs, the animation in the activity (and even worse, the entire UI thread) could be blocked and could appear to the user to be “frozen” while the client waits for a response from the service. This is because the service is started on the main application thread (or UI thread) in the Activity.

The problem can (and should) be avoided by relegating any such remote requests to a background thread or, when feasible, using an an asynchronous response mechanism.

Note well: Accessing the network from the UI thread throws a runtime exception in newer Android versions which causes the app to crash.

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Start a service in android

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