Difference between service and using alarm manager in android

Question

In android a service is used to run in background. But the same can also be accomplished using alarm manager. The alarm receiver can do the same things that you would do in a service. So what is the need of service in android?

Answer 1

Well Both are totally different thigns.

AlarmManager Class is used to perform certain Events on after specific Time Intervalr or it can be on a regular Time Interval. An Events can be execution of Service too. AlarmManager allow you to schedule your application to be run at some point in the future.

While in case of Service it is a background process which doesnt have/requier a UI. A Service is not a saperate process or Service is not a thread. A Service is an application component representing either an application's desire to perform a longer-running operation while not interacting with the user or to supply functionality for other applications to use

Answer 2

Generally,a service is used to process logic when you don't need a UI anymore. For example the service I want to use checks a social networking site for updates every 15 minutes . The service has the logic of processing the update. But who will start the service every 15 minutes? That is where AlarmManager is used. It will periodically start my service every 15 minutes once, so that the service could execute its logic and stop itself once the job is done and my application doesn't keep draining the battery.

Answer 3

Actually these are two very different things. Alarm Manager can be used to do some tasks periodically using service. But Service can be used also e.g. to move some heavy work out of the UI thread(download data from rest server) or in case of foreground services, to do some work continously (mp3 player).

You can get some explanation on how to use service (with some advices considering AlarmManager) on Styling Android.