Running a Service in the Foreground

A foreground service is a service that's considered to be something the user is actively aware of and thus not a candidate for the system to kill when low on memory.A foreground service must provide a notification for the status bar, which is placed under the "Ongoing" heading, whichmeans that the notification cannot be dismissed unless the service is either stopped or removed from the foreground.

For example, a music player that plays music from a service should be set to run in the foreground, because the user is explicitly aware of its operation.The notification in the status bar might indicate the current song and allow the user to launch an activity to interact with the music player.

To request that your service run in the foreground, call startForeground(). This method takes two parameters: an integer that uniquely identifies the notification and the Notification for the status bar. For example:

Notification notification = new Notification(R.drawable.icon, getText(R.string.ticker_text),
System.currentTimeMillis());
Intent notificationIntent = new Intent(this, ExampleActivity.class);
PendingIntent pendingIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(this, 0, notificationIntent, 0);
notification.setLatestEventInfo(this, getText(R.string.notification_title),
getText(R.string.notification_message), pendingIntent);
startForeground(ONGOING_NOTIFICATION, notification);

To remove the service from the foreground, call stopForeground(). This method takes a boolean, indicating whether to remove the status bar notification as well.This method does not stop the service. However, if you stop the service while it's still running in the foreground, then the notification is also removed.

Note: The methods startForeground() and stopForeground() wereintroduced in Android 2.0 (API Level 5). In order to run your service in the foreground on older versions of the platform, you must use the previoussetForeground() method—see the startForeground() documentation for information about how to provide backward compatibility.

For more information about notifications, see Creating Status Bar Notifications.

为什么是 foreground ? 默认启动的 Service 是被标记为 background，当前运行的 Activity 一般被标记为 foreground，也就是说你给 Service 设置了 foreground 那么他就和正在运行的 Activity 类似优先级得到了一定的提高。当让这并不能保证你得 Service 永远不被杀掉，只是提高了他的优先级。