JobSchedulerCompat

JobSchedulerCompat is a backport of JobScheduler for API 16 and above.

Behind the scenes, it relies on JobScheduler, GcmNetworkManager and AlarmManager.

Usage

The API follows JobScheduler's very closely:

PersistableBundle extras = new PersistableBundle();
extras.putString("key", "value");

JobInfo.Builder builder =
    new JobInfo.Builder(0, new ComponentName(context, MyJobService.class))
        .setMinimumLatency(TimeUnit.MINUTES.toMillis(15))
        .setOverrideDeadline(TimeUnit.HOURS.toMillis(2))
        .setRequiredNetworkType(JobInfo.NETWORK_TYPE_ANY)
        .setExtras(extras);

JobScheduler.get(context).schedule(builder.build());

This is how MyJobService could look like:

public class MyJobService extends JobService {
    @Override
    public boolean onStartJob(JobParameters params) {
        // Spawn a thread to execute your logic.
        return false;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean onStopJob(JobParameters params) {
        // Stop executing this job.
        return false;
    }
}

As all regular services, it needs to be declared in your AndroidManifest.xml:

<service android:name=".MyJobService" />

All necessary components have compatibility variants and follow their counterparts' APIs, with a few limitations:

Schedulers

For each job, the best possible scheduler is used:

• JobScheduler (API 21 and above)
• GcmNetworkManager (API 20 and below, if Google Play Services is available)
• AlarmManager (API 20 and below, if Google Play Services is unavailable)

Whenever a job relies on unsupported APIs, JobSchedulerCompat falls back to the next best scheduler. For example, if your job relies on JobInfo.TriggerContentUri while running on API 21 (where this workflow didn't exist), GcmNetworkManager will be used instead of JobScheduler for that particular job.

Why

We wanted a library that offered the core functionality of JobScheduler all the way back to API 16. We wanted it to handle its context gracefully using the best engine available. We wanted it to not have a hard dependency on Google Play Services. We wanted its API to follow JobScheduler's API closely, so that it can be easily swapped by changing a few import statements.

We looked at the status quo:

While all these libraries are phenomenal, neither met all our requirements, so we built one. Its minimum SDK is 16, it doesn't require Google Play Services, it uses the best job scheduling engine depending on the context, and its API mimics JobScheduler's.

License

JobSchedulerCompat is released under the MIT License.