Professional Android, 4th Edition

11Working in the Background

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Using Asynchronous Tasks to execute background tasks
• Creating background Threads and using Handlers to synchronize with the GUI Thread
• Scheduling background jobs with the Job Scheduler and Firebase Job Dispatcher
• Scheduling background work with the Work Manager
• Displaying Notifications and setting Notification priority
• Creating Notification actions and responding to user interactions
• Receiving server-initiated messages with Firebase Cloud Messaging
• Using Firebase Notifications
• Using Alarms to schedule application events
• Creating bound and foreground Services

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com. The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• Snippets_ch11.zip
• Earthquake_ch11_Part1.zip
• Earthquake_ch11_Part2.zip

WORKING IN THE BACKGROUND

To help balance the trade-offs between timely, low-latency app data updates and longer battery life, Android provides a number of APIs and best-practice patterns designed to support running background tasks, while minimizing their impact on battery life.

By default, all Activities, Services, and Broadcast Receivers are executed on the main application UI Thread. To keep your applications responsive while they execute long-running tasks, in this chapter you learn to move any non-trivial tasks that aren’t directly related to updating the UI onto background Threads, using the HandlerThread and ...