How to check if a service is running on Android?

I use the following from inside an activity:

private boolean isMyServiceRunning(Class<?> serviceClass) {    ActivityManager manager = (ActivityManager) getSystemService(Context.ACTIVITY_SERVICE);    for (RunningServiceInfo service : manager.getRunningServices(Integer.MAX_VALUE)) {        if (serviceClass.getName().equals(service.service.getClassName())) {            return true;        }    }    return false;}

And I call it using:

isMyServiceRunning(MyService.class)

This works reliably, because it is based on the information about running services provided by the Android operating system through ActivityManager#getRunningServices.

All the approaches using onDestroy or onSometing events or Binders or static variables will not work reliably because as a developer you never know, when Android decides to kill your process or which of the mentioned callbacks are called or not. Please note the "killable" column in the lifecycle events table in the Android documentation.

I had the same problem not long ago. Since my service was local, I ended up simply using a static field in the service class to toggle state, as described by hackbod here

EDIT (for the record):

Here is the solution proposed by hackbod:

If your client and server code is part of the same .apk and you are binding to the service with a concrete Intent (one that specifies the exact service class), then you can simply have your service set a global variable when it is running that your client can check.

We deliberately don't have an API to check whether a service is running because, nearly without fail, when you want to do something like that you end up with race conditions in your code.

Got it!

You MUST call startService() for your service to be properly registered and passing BIND_AUTO_CREATE will not suffice.

Intent bindIntent = new Intent(this,ServiceTask.class);startService(bindIntent);bindService(bindIntent,mConnection,0);

And now the ServiceTools class:

public class ServiceTools {    private static String LOG_TAG = ServiceTools.class.getName();    public static boolean isServiceRunning(String serviceClassName){        final ActivityManager activityManager = (ActivityManager)Application.getContext().getSystemService(Context.ACTIVITY_SERVICE);        final List<RunningServiceInfo> services = activityManager.getRunningServices(Integer.MAX_VALUE);        for (RunningServiceInfo runningServiceInfo : services) {            if (runningServiceInfo.service.getClassName().equals(serviceClassName)){                return true;            }        }        return false;     }}