Android - AppWidgets, AlarmManager and AsyncTask

Question

I'm not having much luck with updating an app widget with AlarmManager generated broadcasts. Here's what I do:

Initializing AlarmManager on AppWidgetProvider#onEnabled

AlarmManager alarms = (AlarmManager) context.getSystemService(
        Context.ALARM_SERVICE);
    alarms.setRepeating(AlarmManager.ELAPSED_REALTIME_WAKEUP, 
    SystemClock.elapsedRealtime(), 60000, pendingIntent);

I also define broadcast receiver that simply listens for the updates that fired by the AlarmManager. When update is fired code runs AsyncTask that makes a network call. When the AsyncTask is completed (onPostExecute) it uses previously obtained instance of AppWidgetManager to update the widget(s). It all actually runs well until in the logs I see message "Process com.foo.myapp (pid 12345) has died" after which the AlarmManager never fires another update.

Do I need to have some sort of check which will restart the alarms? For example when user access the parent app of the widget? How do I ensure that I can complete the long running task and come back to the widget if my app dies in the middle of the request?

Answer 1

When update is fired code runs AsyncTask that makes a network call.

If this is inside the BroadcastReceiver, that won't work. You cannot safely fork threads from a BroadcastReceiver, and AsyncTask effectively forks a thread to do its task asynchronously.

Instead, you should delegate long-running work to a service started from the alarm BroadcastReceiver.