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I do not understand what difference between those two APIs. I mean when to use the first one. Why is there JobIntentService ? Thanks in advance

Ken Y-N
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Moahemd Abdelkhaleq
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3 Answers3

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I would recommend to read this article explaining about the difference between intent service and job intent service. When we look for the first time at these terms Service, IntentService, JobIntentService they would look almost similar - in one way or other they would perform some operations in background (which user does not notice). But there is few difference in the way they operate,

  • Service - This runs on the same main thread which invokes this service and performs some background operation. For any long running operation happening on the main thread it is recommended to create a new thread and do the job (eg; Handler) by not impacting the main thread's performance.

    Drawback : Runs on main thread

  • IntentService - Intent service also helps in doing some long running (indefinite) background task. The only difference is that it creates a new thread to perform this task and does not run on the main thread. Does the given job on it's onHandleIntent.

    Drawback: The job given to the IntentService would get lost when the application is killed

  • JobIntentService - Job intent service is very similar to IntentService but with few benefits like the application can kill this job at any time and it can start the job from the beginning once the application gets recreated/up.

But from Oreo, if the app is running in background it's not allowed to start the service in background. Android asks us to start the service explicitly by context.startForegroundService instead of context.startService and when the service is started within 5 seconds it must be tied to the notification to have a UI element associated with it.

Reference : https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background.html

Tom Taylor
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    Drawback for IntentService seems strange. I mean what if we enable mRedeliver boolean using setIntentRedelivery() method.This will restart service and deliver intent again so eventually job is not lost. – Mehroze Yaqoob Nov 26 '19 at 10:07
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    Why do we still need `IntentService`? I thought Google is now advocating WorkManager instead... – IgorGanapolsky Feb 18 '20 at 23:20
  • `The IntentService class used to be the way for running an operation on a single background thread. IntentService runs outside the application in a background process, so the process would run even if your application is closed.` so job will not get lost until unless it is not completed please refer this link --> https://guides.codepath.com/android/starting-background-services – Wini Sep 28 '20 at 10:35
  • So can we say JobintentService is Sticky intentService.. – NehaK Dec 22 '20 at 19:53
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Both work same but the only difference with JobIntentService is that JobIntentService gets restarted if the application gets killed while the service was executing. OnHandleWork() get's restarted after the application get's killed.

Dev
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Basically, the two follow the same role, the difference being that an IntentService it is a base class for Service that handles an explicit asynchronous request with Intent on demand, it is starts through the startService (passing the Intent of the service), from hence the service is started as you wish, from the Android Oreo JobIntentService it also performs work processing however it is able to keep running in older versions, it also makes a process simpler. More in fact the 2 APIs have the same follow up. For the Execution of the work from the Oreo uses if JobScheduler.enqueue already in the older versions of the platform, it will be used Context.startService

Hope this helps.

MarcosApps
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