Android Background Processing
Notes: 14. Conclusion
The student materials have been reviewed and are updated as of SEPTEMBER 2022.
Great job reaching the end of the second part of the course! :] This was pretty intense work you had to do with WorkManager and DownloadManager!
You used what you’ve learned in the first part of the course, in a more complex application, to implement similar use cases using the WorkManager. You implemented many workers, returned results from them, chained them together, and observed their status. It’s important to remember that WorkManager is backwards compatible to all Android versions.
After downloading and uploading images, clearing and checking the local storage using the WorkManager, and doing everything manually, you’ve learned about the DownloadManager, which helped you download files in a user-friendly way.
The DownloadManager allows you to download files, and display a notification with the download progress! It’s a pretty neat feature of Android. Just like the WorkManager, it gives you the ability to add network constraints.
These two concepts are very useful, and I’m certain you’ll use them in your future applications! But there is one more important part of Android, which can help you with with background processing, and that is using Services!
The name explains what a Service is, it is a feature of the app, that allows you to build and expose a service, for other parts of the app to use. Services can be bound to certain components, or they can be started with an Intent, similar to how a Worker is started through the WorkManager.
They can also be regular, background services, and foreground services, which are live and visible to users!
You’ll cover more about services, and broadcast receivers, a mechanism they use to communicate, in the third part of the course! I can’t wait to see you there! :]