How to Prevent a Service from Being Killed by Os

How to prevent app being killed in background?

Implement Foreground Service in your app to increase the component priority in OS to lower the odds of its killing.

How to avoid system killing service when application/activity is killed

It is very important for me that the service doesn't get killed

Your processes can be killed at any time, for any reason, based on user activity (recent tasks list, a third-party task manager, "Force Stop" in Settings, etc.) or based on OS needs (system RAM is getting low). You cannot prevent this.

You can take some steps to minimize the odds of the OS deciding on its own to terminate your process, such as using startForeground() on the service, but this does block the user from doing what the user wants with your app's process.

I'm displaying a window from that service so if the service stops then the window disappears.

Presumably, the user wants your window to disappear if the user is explicitly getting rid of your app via the recent tasks list, a task manager, etc. You are certainly welcome to advise users in your documentation of any negative effects that this will have.

You are also welcome to experiment with having that service be in a separate process. My understanding is that this will not help with the recent-tasks list on Android 4.4, though it might on earlier versions of Android. Whether this helps with third-party task managers probably depends on the manager, and this should not help with "Force Stop" from settings. It also means that you will have to deal with IPC, increased system RAM consumption while your main and service processes are both running, etc.

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