[android-developers] Re: Long running Android service is getting recreated over and over

Thanks for all the insightful comments. Too many to reply to individually so I'll just plow through them without quoting.

As to RAM: RAM is a premium and yet when I look at the process running on my phone, the smallest is using 15M, while most of the others are 20M+, some up to 60M+. I don't know if this is faulty reporting from the task manager app I am using, but those numbers seem absurdly high. Why does a text only note taking app need 25M of RAM?

As to long running processes: I am new to Android development, so I decided to tackle a simple app that would be useful to me. I want to log GPS coordinates over a period of time. There are dozens of apps in the market that do this, but in most cases, they either have too many features I don't want or the process of starting/stopping GPS fixing requires too many steps and is slow. So I wanted a simple GPS logger with a start/stop toggle button. Just log points to file, no maps, no Dropbox support, no other extra features. But all of these apps DO log GPS points fairly well and they all run as services indefinitely (I can quit out of the app). And they have good reviews with 4+ stars. So from my experience, users are not turned off by long running services - they are getting specifically the apps for this feature. They also know about the battery issues related to GPS.

As I said, these GPS loggers all run indefinitely and don't seem to be killed at any time. I've personally run some for 6+ hours on a cross country drive, logging points every 10 seconds and they don't have any hiccups. How can these apps works if the logging service can be shut down at will by the OS and it takes 30-40 seconds to restart a service? And you can't do this type of logging with AlarmManager, can you?

As for battery life and cpu: GPS fixing is battery intensive, but I don't know the details on how CPU or RAM intensive the LocationManager is. Cutting battery consumption is one of the things I am implementing in my app, but it will require a bit more computation. Will this trigger the OS that my app is being abusive?

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