Android Apps for Absolute Beginners

Chapter     13

Android Service Class and Threads: Background Processing

In the previous chapter on digital audio, you utilized the Android AudioManager class, which is a subclass of the Android Service class. You also learned about the Android SoundPool and the SparseIntArray classes. In this chapter, we will take a look at the Android Service classes and related processing concepts, such as processes and threads.

Developers use the Android Service classes to perform background asynchronous operations. Asynchronous means that these operations, or more accurately the Java code structures that define them, can go “off on their own,” and process data streams, or perform complex computation, in the background. Background Service asynchronous operations ...