Android: How to safely unbind a service

Question

I have a service which is binded to application context like this:

getApplicationContext().bindService(
                    new Intent(this, ServiceUI.class         


        

Answer 1

Not sure about all the above answers, it seemed far too complicated while none of these would fit the issue I had.

Only binding/unbinding once at a time, and the service was definitely bound at the time of the unbind() call. Don't want to leak anything, so I just made sure I was using the same context for the bind() and unbind() calls and that solved it permanently! Doing something like this:

any_context.getApplicationContext().bind(...);

...

another_context.getApplicationContext().unbind(...);

Answer 2

I found there are two issues. Attempting to bind more than once and also attempting to unbind more than once.

Solution:

public class ServiceConnectionManager implements ServiceConnection {

    private final Context context;
    private final Class<? extends Service> service;
    private boolean attemptingToBind = false;
    private boolean bound = false;

    public ServiceConnectionManager(Context context, Class<? extends Service> service) {
        this.context = context;
        this.service = service;
    }

    public void bindToService() {
        if (!attemptingToBind) {
            attemptingToBind = true;
            context.bindService(new Intent(context, service), this, Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE);
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName componentName, IBinder iBinder) {
        attemptingToBind = false;
        bound = true;
    }

    @Override
    public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName componentName) {
        bound = false;
    }

    public void unbindFromService() {
        attemptingToBind = false;
        if (bound) {
            context.unbindService(this);
            bound = false;
        }
    }

}