CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidandroid-service
mobiledevbrick
mobiledevbrick

Reputation: 876

Using a singleton to talk to an Android Service

My Android app runs a service instance that is not accessible from other apps. I know that the service runs in the same process the app's Activity, because I can read and write to a static variable on the Service class from the activity and the Service sees the changes.

Communicating with the service via static variables/methods (or more properly singletons), is much, much simpler than communicating with it using a Handler or an Intent, which requires making all passed parameters Parcelable. It seems like these two communication methods are really designed for services running in a separate process, and are unnecessary overhead for an in-process service.

It seems like I must be missing something big. What is wrong with using a singleton to talk to a service if you know it is local to your app?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 789

Answers (1)

ianhanniballake
ianhanniballake

Reputation: 199805

Communicating between a Service and an Activity is one of the main reasons to use a bound service: you can build a Binder class that defines the interface between your Service and Activity and pass any objects you want between them without having to worry about parcelling them (as binders require both to be on the same process).

Upvotes: 4

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