Asynchronous Android Programming - Second Edition

Service in a separate process

When an Android service runs on its own process, it runs in an independent process, with its own address space, making the communication with the main process UI thread harder to implement the following:

<service
  android:name="SynonymService"
  android:process=":my_synonnym_search_proc"
  android:icon="@drawable/icon"
  android:label="@string/service_name"
  >
</service>

To implement a service in a different process, we need to use an inter-process communication (IPC) technique to send messages between your application and the service.

Note

IPC is the activity of sharing data across multiple processes, usually using a well-defined communication protocol. It typically has a process that acts as the client and a process that acts ...