For the More Curious: JobScheduler and JobServices

In this chapter, you saw how to use AlarmManager, an IntentService, and PendingIntents to put together a periodically executing background task. In doing that, you had to do a few things manually:

  • schedule a periodic task

  • check whether that periodic task was currently running

  • check whether the network was currently up

You had to stitch a few different APIs together by hand to create one functioning background worker that you could start and stop. It worked, but it was a lot of work.

In Android Lollipop (API 21), a new API was introduced called JobScheduler that can implement these kinds of tasks on its own. It is also capable of more: For example, it can avoid starting ...

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