BroadcastReceiver onReceive timeout

Question

I extend BroadcastReceiver, and in onReceive() I do whatever I need to do.

onReceive() has a timeout, from the documentation:

there is a timeout of 10 seconds that the system allows before considering the receiver to be blocked and a candidate to be killed

This creates a problem when I am in debug mode. I need more than 10 seconds (sometimes). If I don't do all my debugging in 10 seconds my connection is closed and debugging is stopped.

Can I increase the timeout or disable it for debugging purposes?

Thanks.

Answer 1

In order to prevent your app from force closing while you are paused on a break point during debugging, try installing the Dev Tools application and enable the Debug App setting which:

Lets you select the application to debug. You do not need to set this to attach a debugger, but setting this value has two effects:

• It will prevent Android from throwing an error if you pause on a breakpoint for a long time while debugging.

All of the details are here: http://developer.android.com/tools/debugging/debugging-devtools.html

If you are doing something complicated in your onReceive method, then consider having your BroadcastReceiver start a Service and pass along the data it gets from within onReceive. The Service can then do the longer processing.

Answer 2

I encountered this problem even when in debug mode. It turns out that another broadcast was being sent and wasn't being handled because I was debugging the other broadcast on the main thread. Android considered my process to be in ANR and killed the whole process.

I had to temporarily modify the code to not call the other broadcast while doing my debugging.