How to keep a Service with listeners alive after unbind in Android?

Question

I'm currently build an chat app using XMPP. I've created a service to handle the connection and incoming messages, adding the different listeners needed.

The problem is, however, whenever the activity calls unbind on the service (e.g. when the activity is paused or stopped when the user puts the app in the background) the service gets destroyed, even though it has listeners inside it (such as a chat listener, message listener, etc..)

How can I keep my service alive to be able to receive messages when the app is in the background? I read that using a foreground service is quite frowned upon, so I'd rather avoid that if possible.

Answer 1

I actually had this when developing my app recently.

The trick is to start the Service on its own and then bind to it using the Intent. When you unbind from it, the Service will still continue running.

Intent i = new Intent(this, DataService.class);
startService(i); 
bindService(i, this, Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE);