Is an IntentService's onStartCommand(..) method thread safe?
android, intentservice, thread-safety
Solution
It just occured to me, as the onStartCommand(...) method can be called from various asynchronous threads, that this might not be a thread-safe solution.
`onStartCommand()` is always called on the main application thread in any service. You cannot be called with `onStartCommand()` in two threads simultaneously.
Problem
I have an IntentService class that can be started from various places in a complex application - Activities, background Threads, other Services. I'd like to keep a counter of how many times the service was invoked. I use a private int variable within my IntentService class to keep track of that, I increment it from my onStartCommand(...) method. It just occured to me, as the onStartCommand(...) method can be called from various asynchronous threads, that this might not be a thread-safe solution. So the question is, do I need to wrap the access to this counter variable in a synchronized block, or does the IntentService implementation of onStartCommand(...) takes care of this for me? As a note, I know I could safely increment the variable from onHandleIntent(...), but I'd need a count on the actual requests and not on the executed intents.