For the More Curious: Service Details
We recommend using IntentService for most service tasks. If the IntentService pattern does not suit your architecture for a particular app, you will need to understand more about services to implement your own. Prepare for an infobomb, though – there are a lot of details and ins and outs to using services.
What a service does (and does not do)
A service is an application component that provides lifecycle callbacks, just like an activity. Those callbacks are even performed on the main UI thread for you, just like in an activity.
A service does not run any code on a background thread out of the box. This is the #1 reason we recommend IntentService. Most nontrivial services will require a ...
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