Question

I’ve developed an Application (called Instant Buttons) and the app has a widget feature. This widget uses PendingIntent for the onClick of the widget.

My PendingIntent code is something like this:

    Intent active = new Intent(context, InstantWidget.class);
    active.setAction(String.valueOf(appWidgetId));
    active.putExtra("blabla", blabla); //Some data

    PendingIntent actionPendingIntent = PendingIntent.getBroadcast(context, 0, active, 0);

    actionPendingIntent.cancel();
    actionPendingIntent = PendingIntent.getBroadcast(context, 0, active, 0);

    remoteViews.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.button, actionPendingIntent);

The onReceive gets the intent and do some stuff with the MediaPlayer class to reproduce a sound.

I have reports from some users that the widgets stop working after a while and with some research i’ve discovered is because the Task Killers. It seems that when you kill the app in the TaskKiller, the PendingIntent is erased from memory, so when you click the widget, it doesn’t know what to do.

Is there any solution for this? Is my code wrong or something or it’s the default behavior of the PendingIntent? Is there something I can use to avoid the TaskKiller to stop my widgets from working??

Greetings.

Answer 1

Is there any solution for this?

Ask your users not to use task killers. Or, wait for some future Android release to close the task-killer loophole.

Is my code wrong or something or it’s
the default behavior of the
PendingIntent?

Your code is presumably fine. The hack the task-killers use wipes out pretty much everything, so I’m not the least bit surprised at this behavior.

Is there something I can use to avoid
the TaskKiller to stop my widgets from
working?

Not really. Your users — those who aren’t total morons, at least — will hopefully learn to be more aware of the impacts of their use of task-killers. At present, there is no sensible defense against a task killer app.