Understanding Services and Work Managers

Introduction

There are scenarios where we might need components that have their own lifecycle and can work independently to perform a job. Android framework provides native components that can be used for this purpose.

Let’s learn how to create and perform long-running operations in the background using these components.

Services

A service is a core Android component that allows long-running tasks to execute in the background. Similar to an activity, the service has its own lifecycle and associated callback methods. Unlike an activity or a fragment, we don’t need to keep the service in the foreground during its lifecycle. For example, if we need to keep track of a user’s GPS location while the app is running in the background, we could use a service to monitor their location.

The service lifecycle is much simpler than an activity. The diagram below shows the service lifecycle methods.