Applications of IntentService

Ideal applications for IntentService include just about any long-running task where the work is not especially tied to the behavior of a Fragment or Activity, and particularly when the task must complete its processing regardless of whether the user exits the application.

However, IntentService is only suitable for situations where a single worker thread is sufficient to handle the workload, since it's work is processed by a single HandlerThread, and we cannot start more than one instance of the same IntentService subclass.

A usecase that IntentService is ideally suited for is uploading data to remote servers. An IntentService is a perfect fit because:

• The upload usually must complete, even if the user leaves the application

• A single upload at a time usually makes best use of the available connection, since bandwidth is often asymmetric (there is much smaller bandwidth for upload than download)

• A single upload at a time gives us a better chance of completing each...