Chapter 13
Reminding the User with AlarmManager
In This Chapter
Understanding scheduled tasks
Planning permissions
Setting up alarms
Seeing how device reboots affect alarms
Many tasks need to happen daily, right? Wake up, take a shower, eat breakfast — we do all these things every day. These tasks comprise the standard Monday-through-Friday prework morning routine (or a variance of it). You may have an internal clock and awaken every day on time, but most people have to set alarms to wake up on time. At work, employees have calendars that remind them of upcoming events they need to attend, such as meetings and important server upgrades. Reminders and alarms are part of most everyday routines, and people rely on them in one way or another.
Building your own scheduled task system would be a pain. Thankfully Windows has scheduled tasks, Linux has cron
, and Android has the AlarmManager
class. Though Android is based on Linux, it doesn’t have access to cron
therefore, you have to set up scheduled actions via the Android AlarmManager
.