Reasons that the passed Intent would be NULL in onStartCommand

Question

Is there any other reason that the Intent that is passed to onStartCommand(Intent, int, int) would be NULL besides the system restarting the service via a flag

Answer 1

I'm surprised there's no discussion of the incoming flags. I'm going to monitor this in the logs with the following:

if (null == intent || null == intent.getAction ()) {
        String source = null == intent ? "intent" : "action";
        Log.e (TAG, source + " was null, flags=" + flags + " bits=" + Integer.toBinaryString (flags));
        return START_STICKY;
}

Update: Flags were 0 so there was nothing actionable there. I've left the null check in there with no loss of function.

Edit: Ok, I found it in the documentation of START_STICKY of all places! "if there are not any pending start commands to be delivered to the service, it will be called with a null intent object, so you must take care to check for this."

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service.html