Can I stop Android from killing my app?

I couldn't find any good application for streaming MP3s from a URL that can run in the background that meets my requirements so I decided to write one myself. It turns out its incredibly easy to stream an MP3 with the native MediaPlayer if you're running Froyo or better, and I am.

But my problem is if I switch applications and try to keep the stream going (some of them last 2-4 hours) and play a game or something while i'm listening to it, it sometimes just dies. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, my guess is that the Android system decided it was OK to kill that process... but it wasn't.

So is there something I can do to make it kill other processes if resources are needed instead of my streaming mp3 app?

What I ha开发者_JAVA百科ve tried:

android.os.Process.setThreadPriority(android.os.Process.THREAD_PRIORITY_AUDIO);

But it's no good.

You need to make the service a foreground service, if you haven't already. Foreground services have to display an icon in the notification bar, and the Android system will not kill them unless under extreme memory pressure.

Check out the documents for startForeground()

I found that after my Droid Incredible was updated to Gingerbread (2.3.4) all of a sudden it works. I made no changes at all, it just doesn't die in Gingerbread like it did in Froyo. I know there were media player improvements in Gingerbread so I'm going to have to assume there was a bug in Froyo that was fixed in Gingerbread.

As far as i know, a program can't be running forever, at some point the OS will kill it. But what you can try is to have a service and make it generate notifications once in a while with useful information. Then, start the activity again.

This is due to an activity Lifecycle. The OS might kill your app if it need memory. You might have to consider a service

I have had problems with memory management in my Android phone, which terminated processes like you described. You may consider installing a program like Android Booster to monitor available memory and close programs that are using too much memory, so that the programs you would like to keep open have enough memory to run.