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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T21:51:56+00:00

I am a complete Android programming newbie. I have completed some tutorial examples like

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I am a complete Android programming newbie.

I have completed some tutorial examples like HelloAndroid and the HelloViews/Layouts, but that is about the extent of my Android programming abilities.

I am not the programmer on this project, I am the tester(QA) for a company that is developing an Android application that will track company owned devices every 1 minute, and send the positions back once 5 or so are stored.(Limiting mobile network usage, to conserve battery.) My company bought and pays for the android devices, and the employees are aware they are being tracked, both for safety purposes of the employees as well as accountability. Behind making phone calls and some mild emailing, this is one of the most important functions/uses of our devices.

Our biggest problem is that our application can be killed at any time by the Android OS, for any number of reasons(device resources, etc.) Right now, we have an Android service that checks if our app is running every so often and if not, it starts it back up. Once our app is running it can be in the background and request positions using a service in the app itself, then send them to our server for processing and storage.

From everything I have read about Android Development practices, this does not seem to be the most Android “appropriate” way to do this. From what I can gather, and this is fairly limited, we should have an Android service that runs in the background and requests then sends positions, but even this can be killed without notice from the OS, right?

Any advice or suggestions anyone could provide that would point me in the right direction?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It might be worth mentioning that this will kill everyones battery extremely fast… but you pretty much have it right as far as the best way to do it. If the OS does kill your app in the background, your service can just restart it.

    What are your concerns, that the OS will repeatedly kill it and not allow it to do its job?

    Or that the GPS locations wont be accurate? Location.getAccuracy() could help you figure out if the location is worth saving

    http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/Location.html

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