Android: Local service as an market application?

Question

I have a customer requirement to provide some proprietary business logic in a market licensed application. I've been reading up on Android services and I'm wondering what the best way to do that is. Is it possible to provide a local service through the Android market? It seems the customer would need source code to interact with a local service.

I am a .Net developer, fairly new to the Android world so I apologize if this is a routine question for the seasoned Android developer, but I've searched through other questions and haven't come up with the exact answer I'm looking for.

It's probably worth noting that although we are somewhat concerned about the possibility of de-compilation of this code to acquire the business logic, we believe we have enough back end server capability to protect us for the foreseeable future.

Thanks, Lance

Answer 1

There is no requirement for an Android “app” (.apk) to actually contain any user interface. There's even a category in Android Market for such things. You can sell your component and have other apps provide the actual UI.

To provide complex services to another application, you define a bound service. You may need to provide some source code defining the interface for communication, to enable others to use your interfaces, but you will certainly not need to provide any of the “interesting” parts of your source code.