Alarm Manager

• Run or repeat beyond the scope of application lifecycle
• Have ability to wake device
• Fire off a PendingIntent that will start up a Service in the future
• Trigger Service base on an elapsed interval or a specific clock time
• Android batching alarms with similar interval or times together to preserve battery.
• Alarms are wiped out during device reboot. Needs:
  • Register RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETE permission
  • Reschedule alarms in BroadcastReceiver

Pros Cons

Pros

• An application needs to perform a local event at exact time or inexact interval. Ex: alarm clock, reminder application

Cons

• It's not compatible for scheduling network-related tasks

Job Scheduler

• Perform JobSerivce
  • Criteria: the device is charging, idle, connected to a network or an unmetered network
  • Other: at a later time
• JobService runs on main thread
• Support batching
• If JobService run failed, JobScheduler will return its information and the job can be rescheduled or handled by developers.
• JobService must override
  • onStartJob(JobParams params) - runs on main thread
  • onStopJob(JobParams params)

Pros Cons

Pros

• Background work, especially networking.

Cons

• It's compatible only with API level 21 and higher

Usage

How to use JobScheduler

Sync Adapter

• Could be triggered from data changes in either the server or device or by elapsed time and time of day
• Support batching
• Syncs only when the device is connected to network
• The sync can be transparent or not to users

How to use

• Requires a subclass of AbstractAccountAuthenticator and ContentProvider
• CursorLoader automatically registers a ContentObserver to trigger a reload when data changes.
• Tell local data to sync with the server by:
  • Calling ContentResolver.requestSync()
  • Sync automatically with setSyncAutomatically()
  • Add periodic syncs to ContentResolver with addPeriodicSync()

Pros Cons

Pros

• Supports API level 7 and higher
• Not required Google Play Services

Things to consider

Answer these questions:

• Will the scheduler need to exist outside of scope of the application lifecycle?
• Will the app need to schedule networking?
• Which scheduler will allow the support of the most users?