I am developing an application in which a background service is created to collect sensor data. I am starting the service from my activity:
startService(new Intent(this, MyService.class));
I created the service so if the application is destroyed, the background service still continues to collect data. I tried this, and it worked to a certain extent. My problem is that when I kill the application, the service seems to restart because the onCreate()
service and the onStart()
methods are invoked. Is there any way with which the service isn't restarted please?
UPDATE:
As suggested in an answer below, I added the following method in the service but no luck.
@Override
public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) {
return START_NOT_STICKY;
}
It depends on the value returned in onStartCommand.
You must return START_NOT_STICKY
According to the documentation:
For started services, there are two additional major modes of operation they can decide to run in, depending on the value they return from onStartCommand(): START_STICKY is used for services that are explicitly started and stopped as needed, while START_NOT_STICKY or START_REDELIVER_INTENT are used for services that should only remain running while processing any commands sent to them
In short: If you return START_STICKY the service gets recreated whenever the resources are available. If you return START_NOT_STICKY you have to re-activate the service sending a new intent.
Since all of this triggered my curiosity, I made a sample app to test this. You can find the zip with all the sources here There are a startService button and a stopService button that do what you would expect from them. The service returns START_NOT_STICKY in onStartCommand. I placed toasts in onCreate, onStartCommand and onDestroy.
Here what happens:
So it behaves as one would expect.
If I start the service and kill the app as you described, onDestroy does not get called but neither onCreate or onStart.
If I get back to the app and I press start again, onCreate gets called which means that, as I wrote before, START_NOT_STICKY prevents the service to getting restarted automatically.
I guess you have something else in your app that starts the service again (maybe a pending intent).