Question

I am working on a project in which I can see webcam images from the people who is in front of the door on my Android app.

But I am getting a bit confused. I’ve managed to setup a connection with a service on my phone to a server which handles the image sending.

But i only want to get images from the server when someone presses the doorbell, so I need to send a notification or something to my app so I know there is one in front of the door, and I want to decide if I want to answer his call or not.

Now this is why I am confused: if I open the tcp socket in the android service, how can I know that my server sends a ‘call’ message, because the tcp socket is openend when the service is created. Do I need to keep polling every second? Then there is still a little chance that I will miss the call message?

Or do I have to run the application as server and the doorbell as client, so the client request a connection?

Answer 1

Have a look at cloud to device messaging, c2dm , a lot more power efficient too. Built into android.
https://developers.google.com/android/c2dm/