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I have a Phonegap app that functions as a communication service for a specific group of people. Using the local notification plugin found on the phonegap-plugins GitHub page, I have implemented notifications into the app, so that whenever someone receives a new message, a notification will appear if the app is in the background.

After about an hour, though, no more notifications will occur, and it appears the process was killed. When I go back into the app, it starts completely over instead of resuming from where I last left off. I'm assuming that after a certain amount of time, Android stopped running the app in the background.

Does anyone know how to keep the app running in the background until it is told by the user to stop, and prevent Android from killing the process?

NoLongerValid
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  • possible duplicate of [Backgrounding Phonegap and the relationship between Activity, Process, and Service life-cycles](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12226703/backgrounding-phonegap-and-the-relationship-between-activity-process-and-servi) – CommonsWare Jun 21 '13 at 00:30

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As CommonsWare suggests, you could write a dummy service to keep your app alive, but also as he rightly suggests, if you're going to go to the effort of writing a native dummy service, you may as well write the actual service natively and have done with it.

As a bit of a quick and dirty solution, you could maybe use a partial wakelock (see here) to keep the CPU running your app while it's in the background.

I successfully used this approach to keep my Phonegap-based walk navigation apps alive in the background so they can continue to receive and process position updates.

In your case, staying alive to receive notifications isn't exactly what a partial wakelock was intended for and so I'm unsure whether android will kill your app anyway after a while since it's not doing anything (unlike mine which is constantly receiving and processing position updates) but it might do the job without needing to write a service, so may be worth a try.

Have a look at my answer to this question which contains my code for an updated version of the PowerManagement plugin for Android. I updated the plugin for use with Cordova 2.8.0 but also extended it to be able to acquire a partial wakelock.

Community
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DaveAlden
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  • Alright, I'll do some further research using the links you provided and determine if any of these approaches will work for what I am doing. Thanks for all your help! – NoLongerValid Jun 22 '13 at 21:31