How to start and stop android service from a adb shell?

Question

I need to write a shell script to start and stop an android service .

Answer 1

You should set the android:exported attribute of the service to "true", in order to allow other components to invoke it. In the AndroidManifest.xml file, add the following attribute:

<service android:exported="true" ></service>

Then, you should be able to start the service via adb:

adb shell am startservice com.package.name/.YourServiceName

For more info about the android:exported attribute see this page.

Answer 2

Responding to pzulw's feedback to sandroid about specifying the intent.

The format of the component name is described in the api docs for ComponentName.unflattenFromString

It splits the string at the first '/', taking the part before as the package name and the part after as the class name. As a special convenience (to use, for example, when parsing component names on the command line), if the '/' is immediately followed by a '.' then the final class name will be the concatenation of the package name with the string following the '/'. Thus "com.foo/.Blah" becomes package="com.foo" class="com.foo.Blah".

Answer 3

For anyone still confused about how to define the service name parameter, the forward slash goes immediately after the application package name in the fully qualified class name.

So given an application package name of: app.package.name

And a full path to the service of: app.package.name.example.package.path.MyServiceClass

Then the command would look like this:

adb shell am startservice app.package.name/.example.package.path.MyServiceClass

Answer 4

Starting a service:

adb shell am startservice ...

start a Service. Options are: --user | current: Specify which user to run as; if not specified then run as the current user.

Stopping a service:

adb shell am stopservice ... 

stop a Service. Options are: --user | current: Specify which user to run as; if not specified then run as the current user.

Answer 5

I'm a beginner in Android, but got it working like this:

in AndroidManifest.xml, make sure you, inside <application>, have something like this:

<service android:name="com.some.package.name.YourServiceSubClassName" android:permission="com.some.package.name.YourServiceSubClassName">
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="com.some.package.name.YourServiceSubClassName"/>
    </intent-filter>
</service>

where YourServiceSubClassName extend android.app.Service is your java class that is the service. Where com.some.package is the package name, for me both in AndroidManifest.xml and in Java. Used a javabeat.net article as help, look for <service>

Note also, supposedly between the package name and the class name there should be .service. in the text, I guess this is some convention, but for me this caused ClassNotFoundException that I'm yet to solve.

Then, install your apk. I did from eclipse but also adb install -r yourApkHere.apk should work. Uninstall is adb uninstall com.some.package.name, btw.

You can start it from host system like this, thanks Just a Tim and MrRoy:

adb shell am startservice com.some.package.name/.YourServiceSubClassName

interestingly, I didn't need -n.

To stop, I use

adb shell am force-stop com.some.package.name

Hope it helps.

As I'm a beginner, please feel freet to edit/comment to fix any misconceptions (eg. probably regarding .service. in the component (?) name).