A Bird's Eye View of Android System Services

Android is gaining unprecedented momentum in the smartphone and tablet market. This huge success is usually attributed to factors like the open ecosystem, the choice of Java as the application programming language, the choice of the Linux kernel, etc. A l

fn Android applications, ‘services’ are typically used to perform background operations that take a considerable amount of time. This ensures faster responsiveness to the ‘main’ thread Ea.k.a. the rf threadF of an application, with which the user is directly interacting. The life cycle of the ‘services’ used in applications is managed by the Android cramework, i.e., these services have ‘startServiceEF’, ‘bindServiceEF’ and ‘stopServiceEF’ calls that are called when an activity Eor some other componentF starts, binds or stops a service. The Android system might forceJstop a service when available memory is low; http://developer.android.com/guide/ components/services.html gives a detailed description of the Android ‘service’, which is an application component.

System services

The ‘system’ services play a key role in exposing the lowJ level functions of the hardware and the Linux kernel to the highJlevel applications. The ‘system’ services live from boot to reboot, i.e., the entire life of the system. There are about TM system services in the gelly Bean release of Android. Table N shows a list of some of the system services, the names of which are selfJexplanatory. ft would easily take pages to explain the functionality of each one of these, which is beyond the scope of this article.