Question

I am a newbie in android. I am developing an app in which a particular piece of code executes after every 5 seconds in background.To achieve this I am using a service with timer with a timer task in it. For sometime its working fine but after some indefinite my service is running but timer task stops automatically in android. Here is my code please help. Thanks in advance.

    public void onStart(Intent intent, int startid) {
    //this is the code for my onStart in service class
    int delay = 1000; // delay for 1 sec.

    final int period = 5000; // repeat 5 sec.

    timer = new Timer();
    timer.schedule(new TimerTask() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
                        executeCode();
    }, delay, period);

};

Answer 1

In my opinion, you should use AlarmManager with an IntentService to schedule repeating background tasks instead of Timer tasks. A Timer is unreliable and doesn’t always work correctly within the Android Framework. Also, a Timer won’t execute if the phone is asleep. You can have alarms wake up the phone to execute your code with AlarmManager.

See:

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/AlarmManager.html

http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/android/android-fundamentals-scheduling-recurring-tasks/

http://android-er.blogspot.in/2010/10/simple-example-of-alarm-service-using.html

In case of phone restart, you will need to trigger the alarm manager again. See this tutorial for exact instructions on how to do this:

http://www.androidenea.com/2009/09/starting-android-service-after-boot.html