Android App Development For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14

Reminding the User

In This Chapter

Understanding scheduled tasks

Planning permissions

Setting up alarms

Using notifications

Seeing how device reboots affect alarms

Many tasks need to happen daily, right? Wake up, take a shower, eat breakfast — we do all these things every day. These tasks make up the standard Monday‐through‐Friday morning routine for many people. You may have an internal clock and awaken every day on time, but most people have to set alarms to wake up on time. At work, employees have calendars that remind them of upcoming events they need to attend, such as meetings and important server upgrades. Reminders and alarms are part of most everyday routines, and people rely on them in one way or another.

Building your own scheduled task system from scratch would be a pain. Thankfully, Windows has scheduled tasks, Linux has cron, and Android has the AlarmManager class. Though Android is based on Linux, it doesn’t have access to cron; therefore, you have to set ...