Question

I have an Activity that starts a service. When the activity is closed, I want the service to continue running in the background. I have a couple of questions here.

Will closing the activity screen cause the activity to actually stop? Or do I need to forcibly stop it to cause it to stop?

If closing the screen does cause it to stop, then I assume I need to use startService to start it. Is that correct? If that is the case, is there a way to get a handle to the running service next time the activity starts? If it is not the case, then I can just bind to the service.

Answer 1

When your Activity is no longer visible on the screen, it is stopped. Stopping an Activity bound to a Service does not stop the Service. However, you’ll want to make sure you unbind from the Service when your Activity calls onDestroy() to make sure you don’t have any dangling handlers and suchlike.

You can rebind to a running Service the same way as you did the first time. Sending an Intent to start a Service that’s already running doesn’t create a second instance of it, so that’s safe.

A good way to start a Service like you’re describing is to start it using the Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE argument to your call to bindService().

The details of all of this can be found at the Android docs about bound services. It can be a little confusing at first. Follow the tutorial code closely since it sounds like your problem maps well onto the sample they provide.