Design Background For App Using Android Studio

Processing data in the background is an important part of creating an Android application that is both responsive for your users as well as a good citizen on the Android platform. This guide explains what qualifies as background work, defines background task categories, provides you with criteria to categorize your tasks, and recommends APIs that you should use to execute them.

Guiding principle

In general, any task that takes more than a few milliseconds should be delegated to a background thread. Common long-running tasks include things like decoding a bitmap, accessing storage, working on a machine learning (ML) model, or performing network requests.

Definition of background work

An app is considered to be running in the background as long as each of the following conditions are satisfied:

None of the app's activities are currently visible to the user.
The app isn't running any foreground services that started while an activity from the app was visible to the user.

Otherwise, the app is considered to be running in the foreground.

Common background tasks

The following list shows common tasks that an app manages while it runs in the background:

Your app registers a broadcast receiver in the manifest file.
Your app schedules a repeating alarm using Alarm Manager.
Your app schedules a background task, either as a worker using Work Manager or a job using Job Scheduler.

Categories of background tasks

Background tasks fall into one of the following main categories:

Immediate
Exact
Expedited
Deferred

To categorize a task, answer the following questions, and traverse the corresponding decision tree in figure 1:

Does the task need to complete while the user is interacting with the application?: If so, this task should be categorized for immediate execution. If not, proceed to the next question.
Does the task need to run at an exact time?: If you do need to run a task at an exact time, categorize the task as exact. If not, proceed to the next question.
Does the task need to run as soon as possible?: If the system should prioritize the task to run as soon as possible, categorize the task as expedited.

Most tasks don't need to be run at an exact time. Tasks generally allow for slight variations in when they run that are based on conditions such as network availability and remaining battery. Tasks that don't need to be run at an exact time should be categorized as deferred.