Question

I have the need to send and take something from a server in Android on every 10 seconds. Here, on StackOverflow, and in the documentation I found literally dozens of ways to implement it (and everything I tried does the job), but it seems that everywhere someone says something is wrong with that way.

I tried with a looping AsyncTask until it is canceled (that is untill the activity is killed), and I found out that it’s not a good solution. Before that I tried with regular Threads, then I found out that it drains the battery a lot.

Now I’ve done it with a Runnable and and the ScheduledExecutorService’s scheduleAtFixedRate function, similar to the code proposed here:
How to run an async task for every x mins in android? . Needless to say, it works. But will it work if my Activity is in the background, for example the user is answering an incoming call?

In the end, I don’t know anymore what is the most proper way of doing it on an Android phone.

Tnx in advance.

Answer 1

Use Handler it has various methods like postDelayed(Runnable r, long delayMillis),postAtTime(Runnable r, Object token, long uptimeMillis) etc.

Handler mHandler =  new Handler() {
    public void handleMessage(Message msg) {

      //Start runnable here.
    }
   };

mHandler.sendMessageDelayed(msg, delayMillis)