Hi. I want to make (yet another) news widget. Initially I thought it was enough to: 1. Download all the news articles 2. Update the widget every 5 seconds to change the currently displayed article using AlarmManager (AlarmManager.RTC) 3. Update the widget every 30-60 minutes to get new articles
This worked great on the first try but battery was quickly drained. I checked the logs and it turned out that the widget did the 5 second updates even if the screen was off. This was a surprise to me since the docs states: "..set an alarm with an Intent that your AppWidgetProvider receives, using the AlarmManager. Set the alarm type to either ELAPSED_REALTIME or RTC, which will only deliver the alarm when the device is awake. " I guess the device is considered "awake" even if screen is off? I found the same issue here: http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/31d4d66f921b7e4c/8abe098d7d4dac96?lnk=gst&q=widget+alarmmanager#8abe098d7d4dac96 I then checked the standard news widget and the other news widgets most popular on the Android Market and I see that they have services running all the time. Maybe because they want to handle the broadcast event when the screen is turned off? So is this really the best solution to have a service running in the background? So if someone downloads 10 different news widgets from different companies they end up with a list of 10 services in the "Running services" list? Any help is very appreciated. Regards, Christer -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
