Push services: Implementing persistent mobile TCP connections

As a result of my work on IMAP IDLE support in Android's default mail application, I have been experimenting with various strategies for implementing long-lived services and persistent connections that operate efficiently in a variety of circumstances. Several quirks about Android and mobile devices in general arose that could be of value to anyone implementing similar services.

For most protocols, you will need to implement some type of client-initiated keep alive at the application layer. For my purposes with IMAP I simply complied with the RFC and elected to leave IDLE mode then re-enter after 28 minutes of inactivity. On Android, you must use the AlarmManager service to wake the CPU for this task. You might be tempted to use a Handler for timing or even a simple thread with a looped sleep() however it should be noted that unless your application otherwise holds a WakeLock you cannot rely on any timing mechanism other than the AlarmManager. Once the screen goes blank, the CPU may sleep and once it does other timing mechanisms will block until the CPU wakes up again, regardless of any timeout paramters you supply.

After running my test for several days I noticed Android was mysteriously killing processes, claiming that the services implemented in them have "died", then restarting them just a few minutes later. No call to the service's onDestroy method will occur, and even on service restart you will only see a call to onCreate and not onStart. In order to compensate for this you are expected to store your state persistently and check for a discrepency during onCreate and then invoke startService for yourself if necessary. The SharedPreferences system can be handy for this.

Source code for a functional demonstration on this topic can be found at my android-random project page, under the module TestKeepAlive.