Running as a foreground service（前台进程）

Services are often used for performing background tasks, such as fetching emails, synchronizing data, downloading content, amongst other possibilities. In these cases, the user is not actively aware of the service's execution, and probably wouldn't even notice if some of these services were interrupted and later restarted.

But consider the case of a service that is playing music. Clearly this is a service that the user is actively aware of and the experience would be severely affected by any interruptions. Additionally, it's a service that the user will likely wish to interact with during its execution. In this case, the service should run as a "foreground service." A foreground service holds a higher level of importance within the system—the system will almost never kill the service, because it is of immediate importance to the user. When running in the foreground, the service also must provide a status bar notification to ensure that users are aware of the running service and allow them to open an activity that can interact with the service.

In order to turn your service into a foreground service, you must create a Notification for the status bar and call startForeground() from theService. For example:

String songName;
// assign the song name to songName
PendingIntent pi = PendingIntent.getActivity(getApplicationContext(), 0,
                new Intent(getApplicationContext(), MainActivity.class),
                PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT);
Notification notification = new Notification();
notification.tickerText = text;
notification.icon = R.drawable.play0;
notification.flags |= Notification.FLAG_ONGOING_EVENT;
notification.setLatestEventInfo(getApplicationContext(), "MusicPlayerSample",
                "Playing: " + songName, pi);
startForeground(NOTIFICATION_ID, notification);

While your service is running in the foreground, the notification you configured is visible in the notification area of the device. If the user selects the notification, the system invokes the PendingIntent you supplied. In the example above, it opens an activity (MainActivity).

Figure 1 shows how your notification appears to the user:

    

Figure 1. Screenshots of a foreground service's notification, showing the notification icon in the status bar (left) and the expanded view (right).

You should only hold on to the "foreground service" status while your service is actually performing something the user is actively aware of. Once that is no longer true, you should release it by calling stopForeground():

stopForeground(true);

For more information, see the documentation about Services and Status Bar Notifications.