Question

I am currently writing my first Android application and I keep running into references to background and foreground services. Since I intend on using a service in my application I was hoping to get a clarification between the two and how they are used.

Answer 1

Perhaps this will answer your question:

A started service can use the startForeground API to put the service
in a foreground state, where the system considers it to be something
the user is actively aware of and thus not a candidate for killing
when low on memory. By default services are background, meaning that
if the system needs to kill them to reclaim more memory (such as to
display a large page in a web browser), they can be killed without too
much harm.

More info can be found here