Observe Content Provider in Android

Message Counter was using a background service to start an SMS Content Observer. While upgrading the app to target the latest Android API, it appeared that the service was killed after around 1 minute of the application went to the background.

This proved challenging for the app’s functionality until further research led to…

Android has introduced JobService and related classes with API 21 which helps to schedule a Service that would be invoked based on certain conditions that are configured. With API 24, it got the ability to listen to changes to Content URIs. Since I had a tough time to find this solution, the below code explains how to implement this.

First off, we would create a JobService class which is actually a Service and Android calls the onStartJob when some specified conditions are met. Since this method is called on the Main thread, its best to offload the processing to a separate thread.

I’m using the doAsync method from the Anko Commons library from Jetbrains to simplify the work in a new thread.

implementation "org.jetbrains.anko:anko-commons:0.10.4"

That looks simple, right. Next step is to schedule the Job after specifying the conditions. The below example code uses an addTriggerContentUri operation on the Content Observer URI that we are interested in. Optionally specify any delays or any other conditions that you may need with the builder and schedule it.

That’s it. Now whenever the conditions specified are met, Android will call the onStartJob method. We have a simpler, memory and performance efficient approach to observe the content provider.

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