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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T04:29:03+00:00

I’m developing an Android application that consists of: a lightweight background service that logs

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I’m developing an Android application that consists of:

  • a lightweight background service that logs events to a DB
  • a heavier GUI application that summarizes these events and displays graphs.

I’m having trouble creating the service part, though. The graphic application can use quite some RAM, and when it goes to the background, the OS closes it after some time of not being used.

The problem is, when the application gets shut down, so does the service. This is bad because this keeps me from recording further events. I don’t care if the application gets terminated, but the service needs to keep on running.

I have tried numerous ways to keep the service alive, like having it use threads or a differently named process than the main app. Nothing has worked, and I have found no help on any of the android developer pages or forums.

Thank you for your advice!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Try to return START_STICKY in your service’s onStartCommand(). Also how do you start your service? If you use bindService() with BIND_AUTO_CREATE flag it will be stopped automatically on unbindService(). You should explicitly start it with startService() and stop calling stopSelf(). Than OS keep your process running on the background after activity will be closed. Note: the activity and the service run in one process and it’s imposible: “application gets terminated, but the service needs to keep on running”. But it is possible to keep the process running without activities, with service running on the background.
    Read the detailed info http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service.html.
    good luck!

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