I am struggling with android services. The purpose of app is to send text message using native system text application. The phone recieves phone numbers from Firebase and sends a message to all the numbers from the list via smsManager.sendTextMessage. I realized that few minutes after screen is locked the app stops running for no reason..
As I already said I tried to keep my app running in background with android services but it is not working. Is there any simple way to achieve this?
There are a number of way to make a Service work even when the device is in sleep mode. This depends on the feature you want to implement. As far as I have understood, mobile numbers will come from server and app will send messages to these numbers.
If you want to do it in a repeating manner, You can use AlarmManager to start the service from time to time, and fetch the numbers and send messages.
You can also use wacklock to keep the service running all the time, but this will be more battery draining.
Related
We are developing an instant messaging App, and would need to display the "presence" of user's friends with a green dot on their avatars.
"Presence" goes far beyond "my_app_is_opened_and_on_focus", it means (and I guess one could have many definitions of "presence"): user has been using his device to do anything (even just checking time) during the last 2 or 5 minutes.
Any idea on how could we get this "presence" or "generic recent activity" information and log it on our server even if our app is closed? (on iOS and Android)
You can create a service running in the background to check the screen status.
For Android: Use BroadcastReceiver for these actions.
android.intent.action.SCREEN_OFF
android.intent.action.SCREEN_ON
when receiving SCREEN_ON or SCREEN_OFF send a small message to the server to track the activity of the user.
I am pretty new to the mobile development scene and there is a very basic question to which I cannot seem to find the answer. Here is the scenario.
I have a mobile application. That application is connected to a server that I own. To use the mobile application, users have to login using unique credentials. Now lets say there are certain events on my server, about which I want to notify a particular mobile application user. Can my server proactively send a signal / data to the particular mobile app instance [using sessions data perhaps] so that a notification can be displayed on their screen?
Polling by mobile application towards the server to look for such events is not allowed / feasible.
I can speak to an iOS solution. Android surely has very similar functionality.
There are 2 ways to accomplish this:
Silent push notifications
Background fetch
A silent push notification can be, well uh, pushed to devices without alerting the users. This means that upon reception of the notification, the app can start downloading what it needs from your server. You will need to set up proper backgrounding for this to work properly. Otherwise, the notifications will be queued up and will only take effect when the user opens your app the next time. Start here for push notifications. The payload you send is what controls the notification.
Background fetching is process where your iOS app gets woken up by the operating system (iOS) periodically to allow you to perform a task. This task can be fetch data from a server or anything else you want pretty much. This is probably the best of the 2 solutions given that push notifications are not guaranteed to be received and this puts the onus back onto each device to fetch their own data as opposed to you creating a whole back-end system to perform the push notifications. Start here for background fetches.
You mean something like push notifications? You can read this tutorial (or any other tutorial on google) about how to implement push notifications in your app:
http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/AndroidCloudToDeviceMessaging/article.html
Lookup about push notifications on each of the platforms you're talking about.
Plus look into some live web apps, two that come to mind are meteor.com and nodejs
Can Pusher messages be received on Android/iOS app when the app is closed or the phone is turned off?
What i expect to happen...
When phone is on & app is on, it's pretty straight forward from the Pusher docs on how to react to pusher messages sent to the app.
When phone is on & app is closed, the phone should receive a notification that something has been sent to the app.
When phone is turned off, a notification should be received by the phone when it's turned back on to notify that something has been sent to the app.
Are these even possible? If yes, what are some suggestions to lookout for? If no, what can be some workaround?
When an application using Pusher moves into the background on iOS and Android the connection to Pusher will likely stay active for a few minutes. But eventually that connection will be closed. You can't stop that happening within your application (although there may be a "hack" around stating your app is a Voice app when submitting to the Apps store).
Therefore, you should monitor your application moving to the background and put a fallback in place to delivery messages to the phone when it's not connected.
Please see How get pusher events when the iOS app go to the background? for libPusher (the Pusher iOS library).
Here's an extract from the Android Processes & Threads Lifecycle docs on a "Service Process":
A process that is running a service that has been started with the startService() method and does not fall into either of the two higher categories. Although service processes are not directly tied to anything the user sees, they are generally doing things that the user cares about (such as playing music in the background or downloading data on the network), so the system keeps them running unless there's not enough memory to retain them along with all foreground and visible processes.
So, running a Pusher instance in such a thread is a viable option.
However, there will still be occasions where the user goes offline. In that situation your server you can detect if a user is online by querying the Pusher HTTP API or by using WebHooks where your server can be instantly informed if the user has gone offline or come back online.
Using the mechanisms above you can facilitate smart notifications; if the user is online (the app is in the foreground) then send the message to them by Pusher, if they are offline (the app is in the background) then use an alternative mechanism for delivery (native Push Notification, SMS or email).
When an Android device receives mail, does it do this by periodically connecting to the mail server? When the device is in standby mode where the screen is off, I assume that the standard mail app also is shut down but possibly uses the AlarmManager to awake and then check the mail. I can't imagine that the mail app is always running with a full Wakelock turned on, keeping the CPU always running, as that would drain the battery.
The reason I need to know this is because my own app needs to get a notification from its own server when certain events take place. I could just as well implement a repeating alarm that activates my app periodically and checks for the notifications. But if the mail client already is waking up at a regular time interval, I probably can save on battery consumption by using e-mail to notify my app instead. For this to work though, it must be possible for the mail app to launch my app when it receives e-mail. I doubt that this is possible, or is it?
This is what you wnat to use:
Google Cloud Messaging
I am creating a app in android 4.0.3 i.e ICS version, which connects to the server when client gets login into the app.I am trying to get status of an client when he gets online or offline through server & seen onto the app screen.I am unable to proceed. Can anyone say me:
Is it possible to get the status of an user through server?
1-- How to proceed for first step...?
2-- How should I get a response from the server that the client is connected & viewed to other client example - when we login into skype our status shows available with green radio button, In same way how can I get it.?
It ll be very help full, If anybody guide me.
Many Thanks..
I'm assuming you're trying to develop a chat app ?
If this is the case, try using an XMPP library. XMPP is widely used for chat apps, including Facebook chat (and Google talk I think) and there are plenty of open source libraries available.
Otherwise, if you only want real-time notifications as a part of a bigger picture, try using push notifications. Google supports Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) for android. It allows to have push notifications to a specific device without you having to deal with persistent connections, battery and CPU use .etc.
C2DM approach comes down to this. When a client connects to your server, get a list of his friends and their 'C2DM IDs' and fire a C2DM push to their devices. This push is delivered to your app, and you can respond to it by firing a notification, or update UI .etc. (Your app doesn't necessarily have to be running. Push notification is delivered via a specific broadcast, and your app can register a receiver for it to wake up.)
Keep in mind that there is a quota for C2DM messages per device, per app and also a limit for the payload per message. So you're not supposed to send massive files via this. Just a notification to your app, so it can call your server and get an updated list, instead of polling.
You can get more info on C2DM and code samples here. https://developers.google.com/android/c2dm/
Hope this helps.
You may have moved on, but I'm posting for anyone who would run into this one in the future.
Firebase is a good solution to use in this scenario, if the app is always running when you want communication to happen. (It will not wake up your app as C2DM/CDM does, unless you have a service running all the time and still wouldn't wake up if the device is asleep... AFAIK)
It may be useful for some scenarios, but may be not for a chat app as you want the device to wake up when a message arrives.
Note that they have limitations on the free subscription though.