Why use a android service?

Question

Im wondering what is the point of using a android service to do background work when you need to do a lot of things just to access any public methods or get a large chunk of data from a service such as a larger List object.

why not just use a simple POJO that does stuff in the background for you in a seperate thread if you like and gain access to its public methods without creating inerfaces using AIDL, binding to a service etc etc?

seems soo much work needs to be done to access a method from a service class or is that really not the point of a service class in android?

i have developed a android service class that gets 100's of items in a xml structure from a web service who i then parse it into a POJO that is then stored in a List but i am having difficulty finding a way to send this List back to the activity that called this service.

i've read about using parcebales objects but that along with all the intent.putExtra have a size limitations so i may run into problems in the future.

i am thinking of ditching Android services and i have quickly found out why i dont like using them in the first place :(

a simple SomeBackgroundPojo backroundTask = new SomeBackgroundPojo(); backgroundTask.getData();

Seems soooo much easier than dealing with parcelables, serealizable objects, AIDL, binding etcc etc all just to achieve the two lines of code i just typed above :(

Answer 1

Nitpick: an object running a threaded background task ain't precisely what's usually meant by a plain old Java object.

If you don't care what happens to the work being done if its requesting Activity or Application is shut down, then by all means avoid services. One of the main points of Services is that they can stay alive when the user navigates away from an Activity: if you're only doing work to fill a UI ListView, by all means use e.g. an AsyncTask, as is discussed in this earlier question.