Android - Controlling a task with Timer and TimerTask?

You might consider:

• Examining the boolean result from calling cancel() on your task, as it should indicate if your request succeeds or fails
• Try purge() or cancel() on the Timer instead of the TimerTask

If you do not necessarily need Timer and TimerTask, you can always use postDelayed() (available on Handler and on any View). This will schedule a Runnable to be executed on the UI thread after a delay. To have it recur, simply have it schedule itself again after doing your periodic bit of work. You can then monitor a boolean flag to indicate when this process should end. For example:

private Runnable onEverySecond=new Runnable() {    public void run() {        // do real work here        if (!isPaused) {            someLikelyWidget.postDelayed(onEverySecond, 1000);        }    }};

using your code, instead of

scanTask.cancel();

the correct way is to cancel your timer (not timerTask):

t.cancel();

The Android documentation says that cancel() Cancels the Timer and all scheduled tasks. If there is a currently running task it is not affected. No more tasks may be scheduled on this Timer. Subsequent calls do nothing. Which explains the issue.