Android - Avoiding a service to stop when pressing back button

Question

Hi,

I created and binded a service in an activity and I would like to know how I can avoiding the android application to stop when I press the back button.

When the back button is pressed the onDestroy method is called and I unbinded the service in this method. I try to prevent it by taking care of the back button event and manually call for onStop() method but it always called onDestroy after, why?

Answer 1

There are two ways of starting a Service. The first is using Context.startService- this will run the Service until it is explicitly stopped using Context.stopService or Service.stopSelf. The second method is to call Context.bindService. If the Service has not already been started then this will start it. However it will only run as long as at least one binding to it exists- once the last binding has been released the Service will be stopped. It sounds as if you might be using the second method to start the Service. See http://developer.android.com/intl/de/reference/android/app/Service.html#ServiceLifecycle for more info