Direct service invocation considered harmful

I have a more than 2 years old - and quite popular - blog post about service binding and I thought I knew enough of Android services. Then I ran into a service binding pattern that I was not aware of before. I would like to clarify before I start that every alternative in this post "works" - meaning it does what it is intended to do on the Android versions released so far. Still, it seems that this hack I am going to present got into tutorials and books. I think there is a risk here that a good number of coders think about it as the right thing to do and not as a hack.

Click here to download the example program.

This is a version of the good old DualService presented in this blog entry. The main difference that the AIDL file has been removed and instead you will find this strange construct in DualService.java:

public class DualServiceBinder extends Binder implements ICounterService {
public int getCounterValue() {
return counter;
}
}

and in onBind:

public IBinder onBind( Intent intent ) {
return dualServiceBinder;
}

Now this DualServiceBinder "Binder derivative" is a strange thing. Binders are serialization-deserialization constructs that turn RPC invocations into byte streams and back. That byte stream can be sent through the Binder kernel driver and that's how interprocess communication works in Android. Binder derivatives are normally generated by the aidl tool. You can do it by hand but it is not for the faint of heart. Basically you have to implement transact/onTransact methods and serialize/deserialize your data by hand. If you follow my advice, you leave it to the aidl tool.

DualServiceBinder does none of it. It implements a plain Java interface (ICounterService) and exposes a plain Java method. On the other side, in DualServiceClient it justs casts the IBinder to ICounterService in the onServiceConnected method and invokes the method on it.

As you might have guessed, this is a hack. The author sidestepped entirely the Android IPC mechanism and abused two properties of the Android application model.

• By default, the Android application manager loads activities/services/providers into the Dalvik VM running in the same Linux process.
• Classes from the same DEX file (there is one DEX file per APK) are loaded by the same class loader.

These guys here do not use Binder at all. They need an IBinder implementation because of the onBind/onServiceConnected methods' contracts and Binder comes handy as it is an implementation of the IBinder interface. Other than that, the DualServiceBinder instance is just passed from the Service to the Activity without any IPC taking place. That is why it can be recasted to a simple Java interface and the method can be invoked without any IPC mechanism. The hack is actually faster than the AIDL-based implementation (as there is no serialization/deserialization, just in-memory parameter passing) but this approach is not supported in any way by the Android API contracts.

Do you think I found the hack in a shady, unsupported freeware? No, I found it in a book (actually, my attention was turned to this book by a fellow Android programmer). The book proposes another trick: the "service interface" of their Binder descendant exposes just a getService() method that returns a reference to the Service instance and later the Activity invokes public methods of the service directly, circumventing even their own tricky service interface.

I definitely think it is a bad idea to propagate this hack even though it works on the existing Android implementations and is somewhat faster than the regular, AIDL-based invocation.